The Falling Sky
by notmanos
Summary: Post X2: In the aftermath of the confrontation, Logan attempts to pick up the pieces. But an enemy he thought dead is making itself known...in the most shocking way possible.
1. Part 1

Disclaimer:The character of Wolverine & the X Men is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. Bob and his wacky bunch are all mine.  
  
               
  
                                               
  
N.B.: Takes place shortly after "X2", and Angels & Insects.  
  
____________  
  
THE FALLING SKY  
  
______________  
  
1  
  
He wondered if he'd ever forget Camaxtli's smile.  
  
Assuming he'd ever be capable of having nightmares again, Logan wondered if that demonic leer would haunt them.   
  
Somehow he had thought gods had souls, whatever the fuck they were, but everything in Camaxtli's empty eyes and vacant smile told him that was a lie - some gods, maybe all, had none. They were no more souled than demon gods, and possibly less so. The differences were simply powers, terminology, and dimensional placement; nothing more. Camaxtli was just this void with form; a consumptive, needy thing, trying to fill its own emptiness with blood, gorge itself on violence to fill a constant, aching desire that was as eternal as a bottomless pit. Logan knew, under different circumstances, he might pity this god of endless hunger.  
  
But right now, he still wanted to rip out his throat with his teeth. He wondered what his blood would taste like.  
  
Camaxtli still had a hold of his chin, was still examining like he was a racehorse he wasn't sure about purchasing. He wondered if it was possible to hate him more. He already hated him so much he thought it might make him explode; his pulse slammed like a sledgehammer inside his chest and behind his temples, and he knew the minute he released him, he was going to tear him apart with his bare hands. No claws needed.  
  
"You could do a lot of damage, in spite of having a bound power, couldn't you?" Camaxtli asked, the gloating in his voice absolute. "You've already done much, haven't you? The one man killing machine. Why on earth did a wimp like Bob pick something like you?"  
  
"To stomp your lame ass," he snarled.  
  
Camaxtli's look didn't change, but Logan suddenly felt something like a laser knife driven deep inside his brain, burning synapses and making neurons explode like dying stars, and the pain was so great his vision faded out to red. He wanted to scream, but it seemed to get clogged in his throat, couldn't get out. It was just another form of pain.  
  
"I could have a lot of fun with you," Camaxtli said approvingly, his voice a silky purr of menace. Logan's vision started coming back, sparkling red and black at the edges, but the pain seemed to reverberate through him like a physical echo. Yes, he could make him hurt.  
  
But they both felt it then - the atmosphere seemed to recoil, and Camaxtli looked up -  
  
- and Logan felt himself torn out of his grasp, out of his control. "Think I can't find my own fucking avatar, Cammy?" Bob said, suddenly appearing right beside the war god. He was all blue fire with filaments of something darker underneath, holding a flaming sword of the same ephemeral energy, and he sliced Camaxtli right in half with it. Camaxtli reeled, grabbing his abdomen where crimson light like flames bled through, not blood but close enough in god terms, and Logan was stunned. He hurt Camaxtli? How had Bob hurt Camaxtli? He thought he couldn't do that. "Go!" Bob shouted, and Logan felt himself -  
  
- fall.  
  
He felt like he was in darkness for a long time, until his sense of self came crawling back like a beaten dog, and he screamed, "No! Goddamn it Bob, no!"  
  
He sat up, and found himself back in his room in the mansion.  
  
Or a room, at any rate; generic room. There was no sign anyone had ever been in here, which meant it was either his or Chameleon's. He sat up and dry washed his face, still achy and disoriented, and so fucking pissed off at Bob. Camaxtli almost did it; he almost freed Jean. Would it have killed Bob to just wait a minute before he came stomping in through the fucking dimensional door?  
  
Bob probably thought he was saving him. How could he know?  
  
As soon as he thought he could, he got up and disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door against the noise of kids in the hall, laughing and running, sounds of normalcy that felt wrong. It didn't help.  
  
He usually felt like he didn't belong in this world. That feeling had never been stronger.  
  
He still stank of flop sweat, and he figured he should take a shower, but his legs remained rubbery (he told himself it was just the rough transit). He leaned against the sink as he waited for it to fill up, and he dunked his face in the tepid water, rubbing it through his hair. He hoped Jeannie understood someday; he tried, he really did.  
  
He had no idea how long he was there, letting the water drip off his face, watching the ripples spread out towards the edges of the porcelain, his mind a blessedly numb blank. Sometimes it was better not to think, not to feel; sometimes it was better to just embrace that void. No brain, no pain.  
  
"I'm sorry, darlin'," he muttered, watching the circles in the water waver and die. He hoped she knew he tried. But wasn't he secretly just a little relieved that Bob saved him from that? Fuck - he was a coward. He was a coward and ultimately he had failed her. He couldn't blame Bob, although he thought he might for a while; in truth, he didn't want Camaxtli in his head. He didn't want to be controlled again, pushed around on someone's personal battlefield like a toy. For her he would take it - he still would, if the chance came up again - but something inside of him quailed at the thought, panicked, wanted to curl up in a corner and hide.  
  
That was probably normal, if it was any consolation. No one wanted to be physically controlled and mindfucked in every possible way, and certainly not by a bloodthirsty war god who was quite possibly insane. But it didn't ameliorate anything; he still felt humiliated. He didn't just fail Jean by not saving her, but he let himself down - he had found his personal limit; he had found the thing he never wanted to do. He had found the thing that would break him.  
  
The next thing.  
  
"Logan," the Professor's voice said. He had knocked, but Logan only realized that belatedly; he had been hypnotized by the water, by his own emptiness and regret, and never really heard it.  
  
"Go away," he snapped, looking at himself in the mirror. His eyes were hollow, and the water had slicked back his beard, making him look strangely gaunt. He felt a thousand years old, and almost looked it.   
  
There was a pause, but he knew the Professor had not gone away. "Your friends from Los Angeles have been calling frantically - they were afraid something drastic had happened to you."  
  
Oh, god. Angel, Wesley and Yasha. He'd almost forgotten about all of them; they were another life. "I'm okay."  
  
"No you're not." Just like that, matter of factly. Fucking telepathic eavesdropper.  
  
Feeling warmed by a surge of impatient anger, he moved to the door and threw it open, to find the Professor was barely inside his room at all. At least he'd had the decency to close the door. "Stay out of it," he warned.  
  
"You should call them as soon as possible," he advised, unmoved by his threat. "They were afraid you'd been murdered."  
  
If only, he thought. "Fine. Message received. Can I be alone now?"  
  
"Scott's gone."  
  
For a moment that threw him. He didn't get the connection there. "Gone? D'ya mean as in left?"   
  
Xavier nodded. "As soon as it was clear there was no longer a threat, he decided he needed to get away to "clear his head"."  
  
"Where's away, exactly?"  
  
"Connecticut."  
  
Logan rolled his eyes. Well, it was white bread enough that Scott should do fine. "He'll be back. He doesn't know what the real world's like."  
  
Xavier seemed somewhat doubtful, but didn't contradict him. "As it is, we're short handed. You returned at a fortuitous time."  
  
"Scott's not the only one gone?"  
  
"Cerebro picked up a massive mutant energy expenditure in the Netherlands. Storm left to check it out."  
  
Holland? Did someone smoke too much pot and manifest a mutant power to amuse their equally stoned friends? He wished Storm luck. He really wasn't in the mood for any of this, but he realized that maybe this was timely; maybe he needed a purpose to get his mind off his failure. "So you and me are pretty much the only adults here?"  
  
"Basically."  
  
"Great." If someone wanted to attack them, now would be a perfect time. No, maybe not. Xavier was a telepath, after all, and Logan was currently fucking pissed off. He'd relish an attack; he had some frustration to burn off.  
  
"The phone in my office is free any time you wish to use it," he said, and then, with a small spark of amusement in his blue eyes, added, "The danger room is also free, I believe. Just promise me you won't punch through a wall this time."  
  
"That was an accident."  
  
"I know. But Scott isn't here to fix it." Xavier easily maneuvered his wheelchair backwards, and opened the door, letting himself out. But he paused, staring at him, and it was just long enough to really annoy Logan.  
  
"What?" He snapped, wondering if he was in for a lecture about violence not being an answer or some such shit like that.  
  
But Xavier's expression was oddly sympathetic, almost haunted, and Logan's stomach clenched in fear. He didn't want to know what he was going to say, but it was too late now. "You can't think of yourself as an animal now. Not after what you were willing to do for her."  
  
He then closed the door gently between them, leaving Logan staring after him.  
  
"Ah shit," he sighed, sitting down on the edge of his bed, hanging his head down in his hands.  
  
He wondered if there was any chance at all Bob could save Jean.  
  
2  
  
Not for the first time, she wondered why she came to New York.  
  
She knew why she left home. Toronto was nice, it was clean, it was generally recognized as a polite, lovely city … and as boring as all fuck. She could almost feel herself congealing into a big pile of cold mashed potatoes - she so had to get out of there, and her stupid foster home.  
  
But it was odd. Leonie already knew that what memories she had didn't always make sense, and normally that didn't bother her. Yet this odd, inexplicable drive to get to New York … she could not place when the idea first occurred to her. Nor was she clear about how she left home, or when. It was like she just woke up on a Greyhound bus headed for New York City. It wouldn't be the first time such a thing happened, though, and probably not the last; she knew it was related to those awful migraines she got sometimes. Oh no, what did the doctor call them? "Cluster headaches". Cluster her ass - and those phony pills they gave her just made her feel loopy. (Well, okay, that was a good part … )  
  
She was seventeen, for fuck's sake, and her stupid foster parents treated her not only like a child, but a sub-normal. They were afraid of her, weren't they? So she was a mutant - so fucking what? They had never even seen her real powers; they didn't know what she could really do. Why show it to them? Why waste it? They could simply believe what they wanted about her abilities; she didn't give a fuck what they thought of her.  
  
But why had she dreamed about fire? That was weird. Something about a fire … but she couldn't remember anything about a fire. Probably a nightmare, just a strangely realistic one. She once had a dream about these alien looking guys drawing on her forehead; that seemed real, but she never believed it for a second.   
  
She had no earthly idea where she was going. She just made her away from the Port Authority bus terminal to Times Square last night, and found an underage club that still served illegal alcohol, and she lifted some cash from some amateur drug dealers trying to scam girls at the bar. It was an extremely humid night - was the weather in New York always as damp as a wet sponge? - so she found a high roof to crash on. She didn't know why she kind of liked sleeping on roofs, even though she wasn't that fond of heights, but they were really safe - who thought about crashing on a roof?  
  
Not that she ever worried about her safety. She had three separate black belts in different martial arts - karate, aikido, and tae kwan do - as it became her hobby, if only to get her out of her fucking house, and she had recently taken up kickboxing, until she ended up banned from the gym (was it her fault the chain holding up the heavy bag was corroded? She didn't break a new chain - it was their fault for not keeping their equipment up to date). She had some street fighting cred too. She had no fear of physical confrontation; she could kick anything's ass. The kids used to tease her about being "Leo the Lion", but at least she lived up to the name.  
  
Even though something told her she should stay here, she thought about finding out how much it would take to get to California; somewhere nicer. How far would the money she lifted from the white bread wannabe drug dealers get her?  
  
She climbed down the fire escape of the roof she had slept on, stretching out her kinks on the way down, and listening to all the people inside the tenement. Some were still asleep. But more often than not she heard loud televisions, blasting programs in both English and Spanish, people talking, fucking, or fighting in both languages, and while some of the smells (who would fry onions at this time of the morning?) turned her stomach, others - the frying eggs, the boiling maple oatmeal, the warm blueberry muffins - made it rumble appreciatively. Maybe she could spare some of her cash to get something to eat.  
  
She stopped in the first fast food joint she came to, and used their bathroom to clean up, to pull a wrinkled new shirt out of her backpack and put it on. Once out in the restaurant, with its primary bright plastic furniture and oddly unconvincing plastic plants, she found they weren't serving anything even remotely appealing. The stink of frying grease nearly turned her stomach.  
  
She ordered an awful coffee (and spent about five minutes dumping in chalky "non-dairy creamer" and sugar packets to make it even remotely palatable) and an English muffin sandwich she picked everything off of, save for the reconstituted square of scrambled egg product. In the end, she only ate the scrambled egg square; the muffin was like trying to eat an insole. It was hardly satisfying, but she figured her appetite was ruined for now.  
  
Leonie headed out, searching her jeans pocket for change for a phone call (she had to call the bus station and find out how far she could go), when she heard, "Hey, that's the shorty who punked us last night."  
  
Oh, lovely - the poseur drug dealers from last night.  
  
"Fuck you, I didn't punk ya, you stupid losers," she said dismissively, aware that there were four of them following her. There were only two - and a random lackey - last night. They'd just been hitting the meth - she could smell it in her sweat - and they were just itching for a fight. Great - she was gonna have to kick their asses, wasn't she? "Go pretend to be bad and black someplace else, 'fore you all get hurt."  
  
This was a narrow back street; most of the businesses lining either side of the block were closed, either for the morning or for good. It was amazing how crowded New York could be, except when there was trouble brewing - then it was as close to a ghost town as you could get. The residence must have had "do not be a material witness" radar.  
  
She got a whiff of stale cigarette smoke and body odor before the fifth lackey emerged at the head of the street, a pale white boy trying to look tough behind his smattering of acne scars, twenty going on seventeen, physically wasted from sampling too much of the product he hoped would make him rich, knit cap pulled down to the very verge of his eyebrows. It made him look sweaty and pasty as well as silly, not "cool" as he was undoubtedly shooting for.  
  
"You don't give us lip, cunt," the poseur immediately behind her snapped.  
  
"What the fuck you just say to me?" She replied irritably, although she didn't turn around. She was getting a sense of their positions in relation to her. Who had the weapons?  
  
Then the guy behind her drew a switchblade, she heard the click of the blade as it locked into place, and she stopped suddenly and threw back a hard elbow. It smashed into his nose with a violent crack, and since he'd walked right into it, it almost took his head clean off, and sent him sprawling to the dirty sidewalk, the knife clattering away into the gutter.  
  
"Dirty bitch!" One of them shouted, and the rest of the baggy pants and cheap Gap hoody brigade swarmed her. She kicked the first one square in the balls, sending him flying back into another one, while the third managed to land a backhand hit across her face. But she went with it, taking a few steps back, and as he advanced, she feinted towards him, and he shot out a hand to smack her again. She grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm violently, making the bones crackle like potato chips. As he screamed, she shoved him violently into the guy who'd already gotten hit by the guy kicked in the nuts and was just recovering, and they both went down in a tangle of limbs on the pavement. The guy whose arm she just broke in several places wouldn't stop screaming.  
  
"That's enough, bitch!" The fifth one said, storming over from the corner, cocking the gun he just pulled out of his pocket. It was a little thing (probably like his dick), a Saturday night special he probably thought made him seem important. He aimed it towards her face, his hand shaking ever so slightly. "Gimme the fucking money or I'll blow yer stupid cunt brains all over the street!"  
  
She glared at him, wondering what she must look like to him. Some uppity little redhead in a Moosehead Beer t-shirt and jeans that had seen better years, no make up, uncombed hair, an old backpack with a fraying strap. She probably looked like street trash, like she belonged in their milieu, and yet was utterly harmless. Just somebody's piece of tail, maybe one who gave it up for drugs.   
  
The smack across the face had split her bottom lip. She could taste her blood, and she licked it off. "Why should I be afraid of you, asshole?"  
  
That made him do what she wanted - he moved closer. "You blind, bitch?! See the motherfucking piece aimed at your head?" He waggled it, just in case she was staring at the zit on the end of his nose. He then seemed to falter in his step, stop. "What the fuck..?"  
  
Her lip had just healed up. She could still feel heat emanating from it like a burner on a stove. She wondered if that was ever not going to feel weird.   
  
She didn't give him time to gather his bearings. She popped the claws on her left hand and slashed out, snagging the gun and sending it flying. From the way he suddenly grabbed his hand, she got some of his skin too. "C'mon, fuckface, ain't ya gonna paint the street with my brains?" She roared, holding up her hand. The three, nine inch ivory claws that had sliced through the thin skin between her fingers still had streaks of her blood on it, making them look even more menacing.  
  
She looked around at those that were still capable of doing something, and asked them, "Is that it, huh? You wannabe shits got something else you wanna show me?"  
  
They all stared at her, goggle eyed and freaked; one of them pissed their pants, judging by the acrid ammonia smell.  
  
The one who had pulled the gun scrambled back on his butt, almost shoving himself into the street. "What the fuck are you?" He asked, his complexion ashen save for his rosy red pustules.  
  
"What am I? Fuck, how dumb are you? I'm a freak, dickwad, and if I ever seen yer ugly, punk ass face again, I'll gut ya and leave ya for the pigeons - get me?"  
  
He nodded, eyes riveted on her bone claws.   
  
She gave them a final, scathing glance, snarling for effect, then retracted her claws into her hand, the blood beading between her fingers until the gashes healed over. She then secured the backpack over her shoulder once more, and walked off.  
  
Leonie waited until she was on the next block before grabbing her hand. Fuck, popping her claws hurt. She thought, since she discovered she had them (and that was probably the biggest surprise of her thirteenth birthday - it was the biggest shock in general, until her fourteenth birthday … wow, her life was full of shocking revelations), she'd get used to it, build up calluses or something. But apparently her healing thing didn't let her build up calluses, and she had yet to adapt to the pain of constantly cutting open her own skin. Maybe she never would - and wouldn't that be a bitch?  
  
She rubbed her hand and walked out onto a main thoroughfare, quickly disappearing into the voluminous crowd heading towards Times Square.  
  
And now that she had time to think, she started wondering anew what the hell had brought her to New York. 


	2. Part 2

3  
  
Camaxtli stumbled back into the fake surf, more shocked than hurt. "How the fuck did you do that?" He exclaimed, chuckling darkly.  
  
"Seriously man, ow."  
  
"You motherfucking piece of trash drongo," Bob spat, so angry he saw nothing but blue. He reached out with his energy and let it contract as he found Camaxtli's energy, more a void of intent than actual tangible power, but the resistance was still palpable. "It's over, do you understand that? I will collapse this whole fucking plane if I have to."  
  
He leered at him, backing up and gaining some ground (not that it would help), and snarled, "He was trying to switch teams on ya, Bob."  
  
"He was trying to save a life; not that you'd even grasp that particular concept." He could feel Cammy questing for an exit. "Do you think I'm letting you go now that I've found you?" He had no idea Logan would risk that, but why the hell not? He loved her, and he was generally fearless. Okay, Cammy scared him, but Cammy scared anyone with an ounce of sanity - Logan just figured if he was Cammy's avatar he could be stopped and killed, and it would be less painful than having to kill Jean.  
  
If he was a woman, he'd have been Bob wife number eight. Nine? Oh fuck, he could never keep it straight.  
  
Cammy grinned, red energy bleeding from his gums. He was hurt; he caught him off guard, and Logan had - bless him - completely distracted him. But was there something else? "I can go places you wouldn't dare go, Bob." He then got a curious look on his face. "You - you taste like -"  
  
"Itchy? Well, what the fuck, mate? Think I was gonna let that bastard slaughter in your name?" Cammy looked genuinely surprised - twice in one day. That was probably a record.   
  
"You absorbed him?" He chuckled breathlessly. "I knew you could be ruthless if you wanted to be, Bob, but I had no idea …"  
  
"Let her go," he interrupted. The time for talking was long past. "Find another avatar somewhere else, or I swear I will hunt you down." Actually, he had no intention of letting him set up shop in another avatar, but it made him feel better to lie.  
  
"You're assuming I can let her go," he jeered, and opened a rift, a black diamond of energy beside him that he plunged into, disappearing into the void.  
  
"No you don't," Bob shouted, diving in after him.  
  
What the hell did he mean if he could let her go?  
  
Bob suddenly had a bad feeling about all this.  
  
***  
  
Logan realized he missed a lot while he was gone.  
  
He disappeared last night in L.A. - it was late morning when he arrived in New York. So he had only missed a handful of hours, and yet, according to Angel, he missed a lot.  
  
After running the stupid receptionist gauntlet ("What do you mean your name's just Logan? Like just Madonna?"), he finally got him on the phone, and since Wes, Yasha, and the Sisters (and Spike, although no one counted him) were also there, he ended up on speaker phone.  
  
He gave them the very short hand version of what occurred to him: he was grabbed by Camaxtli, who tried to convince him he killed Jean, then Bob rescued him; that was it (they didn't need to know the details). There was some disbelief that that was it, but no one knew how Cammy operated, and Wesley admitted time dilations between dimensions were tricky things.  
  
Their attempts to find them led them to an explosion of mystical energies that was literally explosive: apparently a cliff in Mexico was vaporized by mystical energies that rated off the chart - "god stuff", according to the people they had there. They thought he had been there, and that the god that rose was due to a blood sacrifice. What they couldn't explain, though, was the fact that the god energies picked up by their seers disappeared almost the instant it appeared - they had no explanation for that. But Logan figured it out. What happened? Bob happened, that's what. They all thought he was off the job, but he was probably chasing this thing down to the source.  
  
It came up in time to be banished again, or whatever Bob did to it.  
  
For the most part, they didn't care - they were just glad he was still alive (with Spike, in the background, chiming in, "Oh who cares?"), and extremely glad they didn't have to gear up to fight a nasty god again (they weren't the only ones). But when they asked where Bob, and wondered exactly how it all panned out, he couldn't tell them - he didn't know, and was almost afraid to find out.  
  
What if Bob did kill Camaxtli? What would happen to Jean?  
  
Logan then went and took a shower, hoping to get some more of the fear stink off of him. He was glad no one else could smell it.  
  
He was just getting out when Xavier's voice startled him. "Can I impose on you for a favor?"  
  
Once he rapidly scanned the bathroom, he realized Chuck was being telepathic. "Don't fucking sneak up on me like that!" He said allowed, continuing to towel dry his hair. "Clear your throat or something."  
  
*I apologize* he sent, although Logan didn't think he sounded that sorry. *Cerebro just detected mutant activity in New York City, Times Square area to be exact. It wasn't as powerful as the signature I detected in the Netherlands, but considering its proximity, perhaps worth checking out.*  
  
Logan sighed, and stepped into his jeans, wondering if Bob sent him back here as a kind of joke. "There a bike in the garage?" His was still in L.A. wasn't it? Maybe Yasha could drive it back … oh, sunlight thing. Scrap that plan. Maybe he could ask Angel and his posse of mystics to zap it up here.  
  
*Yes. Scott took his car.*  
  
So Scott didn't own a bike he couldn't take away? Cool. "Fine, I'll go. Know what I'm dealing with?"  
  
*No, except I don't believe it's energy based.*  
  
Well, that was something, he supposed. Wasn't anything stuck with gravity he couldn't deal with.  
  
He found a new shirt - one without bloodstains on it - and for that reason he had to take one of the X-Men leather jackets and boot, and wasn't sure if he should be freaked out they had his size or not. He couldn't remember being cut, but Angel had said something about a blood ritual, so he must have (and there were certainly lots of spatters), yet he felt fine. Healing factor or Bob? He'd probably never know for sure.  
  
Taking one of those dumb earpiece radio things so Xavier would stay out of his head, he got Scott's former new bike out of the garage and took off. It was as tricked out as the older one, just more streamlined. And had bright blue on it. What the fuck was that about? He could see Bob doing it - Bob seemed to enjoy color coordinating with his blood - but what was Scott's deal? It was probably his favorite color. God, maybe some time away from kids would do him good.  
  
As he suspected, getting out on the road was good for him. He felt in control again, master of his own rapid and extremely limited fate. Who needed psychiatrists when you had miles of road and a very fast vehicle?  
  
Okay, he still did. But as long as he could speed, he wasn't being dragged before a headshrinker. He knew he was nuts; he didn't need a stranger confirming it.  
  
The closer he got to New York City, the more he had to cut his speed. Inside the city proper, traffic jammed up sometimes to a literal crawl. That was when a bike was good, because he could just pull over and walk the damn thing; it got you places faster than driving.  
  
He ditched the bike in the upper level of an exclusive parking garage. He figured by the time some guard got his fat ass out of a booth and saw that the shiny bike didn't have the proper tag, and the tow truck was dispatched, he'd be back while they were still trying to figure out why the couldn't seem to move a stupid motorcycle.  
  
He walked to the edge of the parking garage level, which was open on the sides, and looked down. He was five stories above the sidewalk, and despite the thick traffic (New York City, to him, would always be a symphony of impatient car horn bleets, and the occasional atonal shout of "Move your ass!" or "What d'ya think this is, Jersey?!"), there was much construction work being done on the buildings below, so scaffolding protected by tarps and cordons blocked off much of the sidewalks.   
  
It was a gloomy day, the sun filtered through low clouds like used gauze, just effective enough to hold the humidity in and cause a minor glare; the sky between the pillars of buildings looked like dirty cotton. He didn't trust places where the sky looked chewed up and spit out.  
  
He looked over the edge, and figured it was a clean drop. Everyone driving was too busy honking and waiting to move forward a couple of feet to even look up from their lattes and cell phones, so it wasn't like anybody would see him …  
  
"Logan," Xavier suddenly said in his earpiece. "Please don't."  
  
He sighed heavily, not surprised, but disappointed. "I thought you weren't gonna peek in my head."  
  
"In this proximity, it's sometimes difficult not to."  
  
The earpiece counted as proximity? Well, if he could read someone over a telephone line … yeah, maybe. "A drop from this height won't even hurt me," he countered.  
  
"That isn't the point."  
  
"I can land on my feet pretty good. After ten stories, it gets trickier -"  
  
"Logan."  
  
"What?"  
  
It was Xavier's turn to sigh. "Please don't."  
  
Logan rolled his eyes, and figured, fuck it. If Xavier was gonna get his panties in a bunch over a simple five story drop to the ground, fine. He turned and walked off towards the elevator, digging his hands deep in his coat pockets. It was too hot for a coat, even though he was just wearing a white tank top he scrounged out of a door (wearing it, you couldn't even see most of the wrinkles), but the new leather smell was relatively pleasant. "Why's the coat heavier than it should be?" He wondered. He knew he probably should just be thinking this crap, but there was no one here, and even if there had been, who was going to notice one more guy talking to himself in this city? "What'cha got in this?"  
  
"Bulletproof inserts. They also lessen damage from hard impacts." He was surprised. It was sensible, but almost too realistic for Xavier. "I'm an optimist," he said, clearly picking up on his thoughts. "But one must be pragmatic."  
  
"I'm surprised. Good call, though. But have you thought about bulletproof hats? That's all I need."  
  
"I'll keep it in mind," he replied, and Logan was pretty sure he was trying not to laugh. He knew he could get him.  
  
He was hoping the elevator would be empty, but oh no, there was an older, well dressed woman in it, and as he entered, she seemed to retreat to the farthest corner possible. Her perfume instantly cut into his sinuses like knives, and he didn't give a fuck it was the most expensive synthesized whale vomit on the planet, it stunk, and almost made his eyes water. What he needed to do was light up a stogie, cut the stench, but smoking wasn't even allowed in a fucking carbon monoxide filled parking garage - what sense did that make?  
  
She didn't know of his olfactory distress. She was resolutely not looking at him, but the corner of her eye was firmly on him, her spine stiffened, waiting for him to try something. She probably thought he was a thug. He considered telling her, "Ya know, I am actually homeless, without a penny to my name. In fact, I'm so poor I don't even have a name. Got any mace on ya, or is that just your perfume?"   
  
"Logan, don't even joke," Xavier said in his ear.  
  
Oh, there was something. He could start talking to his "invisible friend" Xavier. That would probably make her wet herself.  
  
But the elevator opened on the ground floor, so he'd blown his chance. She looked at him askance, and he gestured extravagantly towards the door, signaling for her to go first. Her look became even more severe, and even though she did leave first, she never quite took her eye off of him until she disappeared. "Now I know it ain't an odor," he said aloud to Xavier, as he walked up the ramp exit leading out of the garage. "I took a shower before I left. Think it's the hair?"  
  
Xavier sounded like he cleared his throat before he spoke. "I'm going to assume your sense of humor means you're in better spirits."  
  
"What, you think I'm joking?" He replied breezily, exchanging the suffocating perfume smell for a New York smell that was an amalgam of asphalt and garbage, exhaust and urine, boiling hot dog water and anxiety; the smell of a thousand different desperations, urbanites crushed under wheels of stress and paranoia.  
  
"You have a unique perspective on humanity," Xavier said, completely apropos of nothing.  
  
*I do?* He remembered to think it this time. Well, the sidewalk was more crowded out here.  
  
"You have an outsider's perspective on everything, even fellow mutants, and every now and again, there's a curious glimpse of … poetry from you. It makes me wonder who you really … are."  
  
He almost said "were". He heard the hesitation, could almost hear him second guessing himself, and Logan couldn't help but feel a small surge of anger. Yeah, he wondered who the fuck he used to be too. *I'm a death delivery machine, Chuck. Isn't that obvious?*  
  
"No you're not, and you know it."  
  
*Oh? While we're on the subject of things I don't know, why don't you tell me the rest of the stuff you neglected to mention about me.*  
  
"What?"  
  
*You knew about Stryker and never told me. What else haven't you told me?*  
  
"I don't think this is the best time to discuss this -"  
  
*It's the perfect time - I'm not in the same room as you.* Not really a threat, just an observation. If Xavier was going to admit he lied his ass off to him, it was probably best for them both that they were as physically far from each other as possible.  
  
Xavier paused for so long, Logan was sure he was going to try and weasel out of it. But finally he said, "There really isn't much more to tell. I didn't omit Stryker's name out of malice, Logan -"  
  
*Nah, you just did it 'cause you thought I'd hunt him down or somethin', right?*  
  
"Well ... there was that fear th-"  
  
*If I had some people might not be dead right now.* Before this, he had no idea he could mentally shout, but perhaps Bob had taught him. Bob could teach you a lot of things, inadvertently.  
  
Another pause, another time when Xavier was caught flat footed. It probably didn't happen to him much. As the telepath, he usually had the edge. "Don't you think that would have been what he wanted? He would have been ready for you. I didn't want you to fall into his hands again."  
  
*I'm hardly a child - I can take care of myself.*  
  
"No one has ever implied you couldn't. But I'm not sure that would have been the best thing."  
  
*It wasn't your call to make.* It was so weird. People kept passing him by, New Yorkers paying him no attention at all, some nearly elbowing him, most too wrapped up in their own worlds to notice. A woman walked by chatting on a cell phone, telling someone (her broker?) to sell, while two Latino men waited at a crosswalk, talking in Spanish. They were discussing the one man's mother going into the hospital to have a tumor removed, and is fight with the HMO to actually pay for the damn thing. A thousand mini-dramas - his own included - playing out on the same stretch of sidewalk, and no one noticing the other, no one intersecting.  
  
"No, it wasn't. I'm sorry."  
  
*What else haven't you told me about myself?*  
  
"There's nothing else to tell."  
  
*Bullshit.*  
  
"There really isn't anything." Another pause, brief this time. "The same contacts that told me Stryker was experimenting with adamantium had told me of a mutant ... operative-"  
  
*Assassin. Just say it, Chuck - you think I haven't figured that much out by now?*  
  
This pause seemed reluctant, either ashamed or angry, possibly both. "Operative," he insisted. "Known only by the code name The Wolverine. The rumors attached to the name were so sketchy and so outlandish I didn't believe them. It sounded like the type of thing you'd tell a child to scare them. A ruthless killer, leaving no trace, unstoppable, un-killable, able to track you down anywhere at any time. It sounded like a fairy story; I gave it no credence at all."  
  
*You didn't even look into it?*  
  
"I did, but all I found was rumors. According to the official records, you didn't exist."  
  
Logan thought bitterly that he still didn't officially exist. That's why, even after the media finally got a picture of him (poor as it was), no one could ever slap a name on him. He was a nothing, a nowhere man, a bone fide living ghost. A shadowy fragment of a man who used to be. *And you didn't believe the stories? Even after you met me?*  
  
"You were not that person, Logan. If I thought for a moment that you were I would have never allowed you in the mansion in the first place." He said it so crisply Logan almost believed him.  
  
*But I am that person.*  
  
"No you're not. The rumors painted a portrait of a psychopath; a beast in Human form. That's not you."  
  
He scoffed, and not only admired Xavier's diplomatic skills, but also the fact that New Yorkers took "don't walk" signals as mere suggestions. *It is me.*  
  
"No man who would give up his life for another is a beast."  
  
*Could be, if there's really nothing to give up.*  
  
"Don't slide into self-pity."  
  
*It is not self-pity. Would you want my life, Chuck? Wanna switch? Hey, you're a big ol' teep - can't you do the mind swapping thing?*  
  
Logan knew he had crossed a line even as he was thinking it, but it was even more impossible to take back a thought than it was a word. Xavier was quiet for a long time, the silence angry, until he finally said, "Well, I would be able to walk again. That might have some novelty."  
  
Ah shit. *Look, I didn't mean-*  
  
"You did, but that's quite all right. You have every reason to be angry at me. I thought I was doing what was best for you - protecting you from something until you were ready to handle it - but you're not a child, and I had no right to withhold the information from you. I hope I haven't completely lost your trust."  
  
*I'm not sure you ever completely had it in the first place.*  
  
He chuckled bitterly. "No, I suppose not. You don't give out trust easily."  
  
*For good reason.* A cheap shot, but still valid.  
  
Logan had finally hit Time Square, the massive collection of buildings and billboards, electric signs and large projection screens, with arteries constantly full of Humans and cars; a massive heart on the constant verge of attack. At night, it was almost bright enough to be part of Tokyo (but not clean enough; not by half), but in the day it looked somewhat seedy, like a cheap floozy wearing too much make up, but not enough to cover the signs of the wild night she just had, and hadn't stopped paying for. *They still around?* He wondered, meaning the mutant.  
  
"Yes. They're not currently active, but my last reading had them at the plaza near the subway station." He quieted for a moment, then added, sounding amused, "You read lots of old detective novels, don't you? Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett?"  
  
That threw him completely. What? *Not recently. Why?*  
  
"Oh, no reason."  
  
But Logan was sure there was; he was sure it was a joke on him that he just wasn't getting right now.  
  
At this time of day, the plaza in question wasn't very crowded. A very meager attempt to clean up for the tourists, it was just tiled pavement that the skateboarders loved, and poured concrete benches that ringed a square of dirt (whatever the hell was supposed to be in there hadn't been added yet - right now it was just a big ashtray) near the strangely neat subway entrance. There were two men sitting on an outer bench, within shouting distance of a hot dog cart; a clearly homeless man sacked out on a farther bench, brown paper wrapped bottle of booze still wedged between his knees; three teenage boys with baggy shorts barely covering their asses and backwards turned baseball caps on their heads skateboarding (badly-but they thought they were pretty cool) through the plaza; an older man eating an early lunch and mumbling into a ubiquitous cell phone; a young woman smoking a cigarette; and there were two different groups of people (two suited businessmen, and a group of three women) walking through. This wasn't counting the people walking past in great proliferation, or the guy in the cartoon alien suit at the base of the plaza stairs. (Advertising something - who the hell knew what. Maybe somebody finally found backing for that musical version of Star Wars.) *Who am I looking for here?*  
  
"Young woman. I believe she had red hair."  
  
His eyes scudded back to the young woman sitting by herself on the far bench, facing towards a café. Her head was actually leaning back, as if looking towards the sky, and she was puffing a cigarette expertly, as if an old addict, sending smoke into the air like a chimney. She wore worn jeans and sneakers, a slightly wrinkled olive drab t-shirt with a peeling Moosehead Beer logo on it, a black canvas jacket pooled around her waist, and an old backpack beside her, one strap looped around her arm. If someone was so inclined, they could easily run by and grab it, and dislocate her shoulder in the process. *I gotta a visual. She ain't doin' nothing. What's the protocol?*  
  
"Say hello?"  
  
*She'll think I'm hittin' on her.*  
  
"Oh, surely now."  
  
That was probably why Scott was ideal for this kinda shit. He looked and seemed positively sexless, like a permanent Boy Scout, harmless as a fluffy bunny rabbit. But him? Well, the woman's reaction to being alone in an elevator was probably a reasonable barometer - thug or pervert or both.  
  
She shifted position, looking back towards the café, and Logan got a good look at her face …  
  
… and instantly froze.  
  
"What is it?" Xavier said instantly, obviously picking up on it.  
  
The girl looked just like Static. It was so uncanny he thought for a moment he was looking at a ghost. But the girl had bottle green eyes, not pure white like Static's, and her light auburn hair was cut in a punkier style, but … it was her. The button nose, the gently pointed chin, the creamy skin tone, the delicate bone structure. And that specific color of red hair wasn't exactly common.  
  
*She looks like Static,* he thought, even though he knew Xavier must have been eavesdropping on his thoughts all this time.  
  
"I'm sure it's a coincidence. There -"  
  
"It's no fucking coincidence," he muttered under his breath, shock giving way to a sudden, inexplicable anger. "She could be her fucking clone, save for the eyes, she's -" Logan realized what he had just said, and stopped dead.  
  
Clone. Eidolon Project.  
  
"Logan-" Xavier began warily.  
  
"This is a trap; a fucking trap," he growled, quickly scanning the near by buildings.  
  
Roofs in this part of New York City were out for snipers, as most of the angles were either bad, exposed (at least in daylight), or impossible. But they could be inside any of several windows, the dirty blank eyes of the most promising ones blocked by the glare of the sun. He saw no one suspicious in the sidewalk crowd or loitering near the crowd, but that in itself said nothing. They wouldn't want anyone on the street that smelled of gun oil or powder. Even in the noisome miasma of an urban street scene, they had to know he could still parse the smells, still discover the odd one out.  
  
There was a cop on a motorcycle across the street and up a block, talking to some tourists near the crosswalk. But he was probably a genuine cop; he was overweight, and his uniform shirt didn't fit quite right. If he was a plant, his uniform shirt would fit to a tee - sometimes espionage groups got their details too perfect, and oddly that's what usually tripped them up. Too good was equal to wrong.  
  
"Even if you're right, she could be an innocent victim in all of this," Xavier said suddenly in his ear. "Does she look like she was waiting for you?"  
  
No, that hadn't occurred to him. He glanced at her, watching her profile as she stubbed the cigarette out on the plaza with the toe of her sneaker, and once again marveled at how much she looked like Static, so much so he felt a pang of regret. Were all the woman he failed in his life coming back to bite him on the ass?  
  
She must have noticed him staring at her, as she looked at him, annoyed. "What the fuck are you lookin' at?" She snapped, like a native New Yorker.  
  
No, she hadn't been expecting him. She was the bait for the trap. Now where the hell were the fucks waiting to spring it? 


	3. Part 3

Still glancing around warily, he approached her, braced for anything. "Sorry. I was looking for someone, thought you might be able to help me."  
  
Her gaze was suspicious and far from kind. "I doubt it." The angry set of her jaw brought on a sense of déjà vu, but since he had no conscious memory of her looking like that, it just made him feel slightly queasy. How hard was it to know something you didn't really know? It didn't even make sense.  
  
He found a business card in his pocket and held it out towards her. "You sure?"  
  
She clearly didn't want to take it - perhaps she thought he was one of those guys who handed out strip show flyers on the corner - but curiosity got the better of her. She snatched it out of his hand, and glanced at it. He wasn't smelling fear from her. She didn't trust him, no, but she wasn't terrified either.   
  
Reading the card, she snorted derisively. "Gifted students? What is this, a Christian school scam or something?"  
  
He sat down on the opposite end of the bench, and said quietly, "Mutants. It's not just a school, it's a place where we can crash and be safe."  
  
She raised an eyebrow at him. "We? I ain't no mutant."  
  
"I know that you are. So am I."  
  
She tossed the card back in his lap. "I bet you are, with that hair."  
  
The hair - he knew it was the hair. He put the card back in his pocket, and heard an odd noise. Her stomach growled, and he recalled how she looked through the smoky glass window of the café. She was hungry - did she not have the money to pay for anything? "What d'ya say I buy ya a coffee or something? We can get off the street and you can listen to me yammer before tellin' me to go fuck myself and storm off?" Any strike team would be unlikely to hit a crowded restaurant as well - they'd wait until they came back outside again. But that would also allow Logan to note anyone getting into position, or acting as a "scout".  
  
"Logan …" Xavier warned in his ear.  
  
"I can tell you to fuck off and storm off now," she pointed out.  
  
"Yeah, but my way you can get a free lunch outta me."  
  
She considered that, staring down at the remains of her cigarette smeared across the tiles. He could tell by her posture she really didn't want to, but hunger was winning out. "You gonna try somethin'?"  
  
"In a public place? Ya gotta be nuts."  
  
"That puts her at ease how?" Xavier wondered acerbically.  
  
But this girl was not afraid of him. Everything in her body language said she thought she was a bad ass who could handle anyone - himself included. And just like he expected, she smirked at that comment on his part, finding it almost a challenge - and if she was anything like him, she couldn't turn a challenge down. "Yeah, okay. Try anything and I'll rip yer balls off."  
  
"Wow. I bet you got guys linin' up around the block to take you out."  
  
She flashed him the middle finger as she got up, shouldering her backpack. He smiled, and tried not to laugh, finding her defiance and tough chick act as funny as she obviously found his approach. "I'll never doubt your instincts again," Xavier said.  
  
*Damn well better not* Logan thought, following her into the café. He gave another quick, cursory glance around, but there was no one moving into obvious position, nor could he feel eyes on them at all.  
  
But he'd be damned if he believed this situation was anything but a set up.  
  
4  
  
Days just couldn't get any worse when the only one you could hang out with was Wesley.  
  
Being dead and non-corporeal (well, mostly), you'd figure the worst that could happen to you already had occurred. But Spike figured he was the butt of some big, cosmic joke, and something was laughing its high holy ass off at his expense. "Let's see how much we can torment the dead bugger."  
  
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the upper class bastard was doing something interesting, like killing a Prodac demon (or schtupping it, which would have been really funny), but no, he was in "the archives", the fancy shmancy name for the basement, which was full of books and filing cabinets, rows of them reaching into the sterile, brightly lit corners.  
  
That wasn't right at all. Everyone knew places like this needed lots of dark, dank corners, places where things could hide and sneak up on you. Not this florescent lit, utilitarian library. It smelled more like dust than moldering paper, which was always a bad sign.  
  
Wesley was sitting at the desk near the front, using something like a bar code scanner, running it over pages of a crumbling book and apparently uploading the text to the computer he was staring at. Softly, General Public's "Tenderness" played on a radio hidden somewhere behind him, and that surprised Spike, because he always figured the Watchers went for that poncy classical shit, not pop oriented ska. But if he thought about it, it did make a certain kind of sense.  
  
"Is everyone else gone?" Wesley asked, never glancing away from the computer screen.  
  
Spike wandered down the aisles, trying to rip books off the shelves, and watching in disgust as his hand passed right through their spines. Fuck fuck fuck; he couldn't even do minor vandalism anymore. "No, they're meeting with that big hoo hah demon prince, Pile-Of-Pud."  
  
"Pylhenaupoud."  
  
"Whatever. For some reason, when I try and walk in, it's like something holds me back."  
  
"He probably has some kind of ghost repelling charm with him. We were told he was quite superstitious."  
  
"A demon prince who's superstitious? Boy, was he born in the wrong species." He came up to Wesley's metal desk, but the failed Watcher had yet to even glance in his direction. That was kind of insulting. "There are charms that repel ghosts?"  
  
He nodded, continuing to scan and stare at the computer screen like it was a laser light show. "And spells. The charms are harder to find, though."  
  
He didn't want to know if they had been investigating that, though the bastards probably had. "So why ain't you up with the welcoming party for Pylon-Of-Pork?"  
  
Finally Wesley glanced up at him, with an impatient sigh. "He found out about my former profession, and it seems he disliked it immensely."  
  
"Watcher?"  
  
"Demon hunter. But it's fine, I wanted to get started on this anyways."  
  
"Don't ya have chippies that could do this for you?"  
  
Wes gave him a disapproving look for that. What? They were all fucking chippies around here - or hell beasts of some sort, or - worse yet - lawyers. "I'm attempting to translate the Book of Ragana. I'd hardly farm that off to a secretary."  
  
"I thought all the books around here were pre-translated."  
  
"Not these. The translation key was a specific demon who died a long time ago, and they didn't keep his brain."  
  
"Really? I'm shocked. I thought no one died around here without the big bad's permission."  
  
"Accident's happen."  
  
Spike moved around the desk, wondering if Wesley was actually at the spankme.com website, but no, there was indecipherable scribbling all over the screen, matching the drunken monkey scrawl all over the crumbling pages of the book open on the desk. "So you made a translation program?" How big a nerd was this guy? Had he ever gotten laid in his life?  
  
"No, I downloaded one off the internet," he said, and Spike wasn't sure if he was joking or not. Which was worse - nerd or geek? Either way, he was a hopeless poindexter.  
  
Well, no matter where he got it from, actual words seemed to assemble from the spastic chicken scratch on screen, and Wes glanced away to turn to the next crumbling page. But then he stopped and looked back at the monitor. "What the hell did that say?"  
  
"What?" Spike peered at the monitor, hoping that there was something juicy. Even a "Fuck all you wankers!" would have been a change of pace.  
  
But as he leaned in for a good look, the monitor suddenly flickered, and something at the back of the computer spit sparks as the power died, plunging the room into darkness. Wesley, in reflexive response, shoved his chair back violently, away from the flying motes of fire, and went straight through Spike.  
  
How fucking typical. Just go through the ghost, don't even try and treat him like a normal being. Fuckheads; they were all fuckheads.  
  
The power came back up almost instantly, but the computer was dead, the world's most expensive paperweight. Wes stabbed a button on his phone, and snapped, "What the hell was that?"  
  
"I-I don't know, sir," a nasal male voice replied. It sounded like a swimmer who forgot to take out his nose plugs. "There was a power surge in the system … I'll get the tech guys on it."  
  
"You do that," he replied, then broke the connection. He sunk back in his chair with a groan, and then saw what had happened to the book. A spark had landed on its open pages, blackening them both to a crisp. Remarkably, the rest of the book wasn't even smoldering. "Power surge my ass," Wesley snapped.  
  
"Maybe you saw something the big guys didn't want you to see," Spike suggested.  
  
"Perhaps," he agreed sourly.  
  
"What was it anyways?"  
  
"It was a prophesy, and Logan's name was in it. If the translation is correct, he has a major role to play in an upcoming apocalypse. But that doesn't make sense."  
  
"'Cause he's such an ugly bugger?" He then asked a question that had been bugging him for a while: "What are his freaky powers anyways? Instant hair helmet?"  
  
"He has superior senses and a healing factor that allows him to recover from even fatal injuries," he replied distractedly.  
  
"Sounds like a vampire."  
  
"He also has unbreakable, lethally sharp metal claws in each hand."  
  
"I bet that makes scratching his balls fraught with drama."  
  
Wesley scowled at him, and jumped back to the original topic, which he was obviously more comfortable with. "For your information, he shouldn't be in a book of prophesy because he's a Human. Save for Slayers, no Human names generally appear in things of this nature."  
  
"But like Tokyo Rose said, he ain't a Human anymore, is he? He's an avatar." Spike scoffed at the thought. "I still can't believe that Aussie bastard's a god. Who knew a Bruce would be allowed to get in the door? He must have crashed the party, or they have much lower standards than I ever imagined."  
  
"Oh my god," Wes gasped, still staring at the burned pages of the book. "Would that mean that Bob … oh shit." He levered himself out of his chair, and immediately headed for the lift.  
  
"Bob what? C'mon mate, don't leave us hanging," Spike protested, following him.  
  
But of course he did leave him hanging. Once a Watcher, always a Watcher.  
  
5  
  
Logan made sure they took a table in the back, far from the window, but one that not only gave him an unobstructed view of the door, but a good view of the windows too. Anyone who attempted to get closer for a better look, or attempted a flanking maneuver, would be instantly recognizable.  
  
He got the ball rolling with the girl by asking where she was from in Canada. He actually figured, from her faint accent, she was from Toronto, but he figured he'd let her say it. She was surprised, but admitted that she was from Toronto. "You a Canuck?" She wondered. She wasn't as adept at placing accents as he was.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"From where?"  
  
Okay, that was going to be a poser. "Alberta," he said, figuring if that was the first place his all too brief memories were able to recall, he might as well say he was from there.  
  
She grinned. "A prairie oyster? You don't look like a hick."  
  
He smirked. Prairie oyster? Did she know what that actually was? Yeah, she probably did, hence the nickname. "Some of us have better things to do than bugger sheep all day."  
  
She ordered a large mocha with whipped cream, and a chocolate chip scone; he could feel insulin shock starting to set in. He ordered for himself a triple berry blended tea drink, which made her look at him funny. "You drink those?"  
  
He shrugged. "Coffee does nothing for me."  
  
She nodded as if that was fair, briefly glancing around at the patrons. Most of them gave them a strange look as they came in, but now no one gave them a second glance. "I know what you mean, but I kinda like the taste."  
  
The girl didn't want to talk about herself, not at first, though she gave her name as Leonie - he guessed it was real, as that was a horrible pseudonym.   
  
Logan was forced to talk about himself, which meant lie his head off unless he wanted to scare the girl to death. So he said he was an "instructor" at the school, but rather than say art, he said he taught self-defense (well, he would if Scott ever let him), and told her how it hid behind the school moniker for maximum protection from the outside world. She seemed doubtful, but started to thaw a bit.  
  
As soon as the waitress brought their order, Logan took a sip of his drink, and closed his eyes to savor the flavor. The funny thing was, this icy fruit and tea puree was almost orgasmically intense in its flavor, at least to his sensitive taste buds. When he opened her eyes to find her staring at him, she asked, "It's that good?"  
  
"It is to me," he said, deciding not to give further details.  
  
She lifted her eyebrows in a kind of visual shrug. "Maybe I should try one sometime."  
  
Eventually he was able to coax out of her that she had heightened senses as well, but when he brought up that the way they had found her was Cerebro had picked up on her use of her powers, she didn't say what she had done, only that she "got in a fight". "Muggers," she explained. "You know how it is."  
  
He nodded, relatively certain she was lying. Was she trying to mug someone? Or was it more complex - or personal - than that? He wondered if he'd ever get it out of her, but he let it go for now. When she asked him what his powers were - beyond his hair (oh, ha ha) - he simply told her better than average senses and a healing factor, which made her briefly startled. "A healing thing? I got one too."  
  
He raised an eyebrow at that. He finally met another mutant with an equivalent power? Who looks like Static … suddenly had a bad feeling about this. Static didn't have a healing factor, did she? "It's really helpful, isn't it?" He said blandly, not ready to mention his claws. What if she had claws? Nah.  
  
"Yeah. Kinda burns, though."  
  
He shrugged, still trying to remain casual. "You get used to it."  
  
"What's wrong, Logan?" Xavier said, almost making him jump in his seat. He'd been silent for so long Logan thought he'd cut the transmission.   
  
*Nothing. I just …* He didn't even know how to finish the thought. Finally, he figured out a way. *I'm just afraid Static isn't the only place she got her genes from.*  
  
He knew Xavier had heard him, but he was silent, because he didn't know what to say.  
  
Logan wondered what he'd do if it turned out he had family after all.  
  
***  
  
Scott wondered if he should get therapy.  
  
How did you find a psychologist? Did you just pick one out of a phone book? Did your doctor have to recommend one for you?  
  
Oh, shit. Were there shrinks specializing in mutants, or people who'd had bad experiences with gods? Yes, he should ask that last one - ask, and be permanently committed. Maybe it would be a nice vacation with the added bonus of psychotropic and anti-psychotic medications. What was that old Saturday Night Live commercial? "You've just had a heavy session of electroshock therapy, and you're more relaxed than you've been in weeks. All those childhood traumas magically wiped away … along with most of your personality …"  
  
That actually sounded good right now. That was the kind of vacation he could really get behind. Did they even use electroshock therapy anymore?  
  
Scott laid back on the lumpy sofa that came with this apartment, and stared up at the popcorn textured ceiling, watching the sunlight waver like a flag in the wind. It was a reflection of the ornamental pond at the front of the building, and it was hypnotic in its way. This wasn't a bad apartment building. Stark and generic in its outward design, all the corridors and stairs leading to the units were exposed to the outside, and he liked that for safety reasons. No one could sneak up on you here, not without you knowing they were coming.  
  
And that was just more fuel to the fire of his case for his own insanity. God, was he Logan now? Was he just anticipating attack as a matter of course? Maybe he should - he'd been recognized, hadn't he?  
  
He'd just gone to the supermarket to get some groceries, and it was all fine and good until he got to the check stand. The clerk, a young bleach blonde with green painted nails, kept staring at him out of the corner of her eye, and finally said, "Do I know you?" He told her no, but she still insisted, "I swear I know you from somewhere."  
  
"I get that a lot," he claimed, wondering if it had been a slow news days when he and Logan took on the would be armored carjackers. Was it? Oh shit -what if it wasn't just plastered all over the Eastern seaboard? What if it wound up on CNN?   
  
What didn't wind up on CNN?!  
  
Man - was he lucky the apartment manager was blind.  
  
He got out of the store without her ever figuring out where she'd seen him before, but now he was terrified to go anywhere else. If it would only rain, maybe he could wear a hood …  
  
This was crazy; he was going to drive himself crazy, if he wasn't already there.  
  
He considered going out to a movie - movie theaters were dark, and something loud and stupid would get his mind of himself for a while - but then he remembered the last time he'd almost gone to a movie had been with Jean … and they'd stumbled on that massacre by Fenrir, which led to … Camaxtli.  
  
Scott pressed a pillow over his face, trying to suffocate himself, but it smelled like stale beer, so he threw it across the room. Who the hell had lived here before, a frat boy?  
  
The phone wasn't hooked up yet, and he was glad, otherwise he was prone to call the Professor and make sure everything was okay. He was sure the mansion hadn't fallen apart without him, as much as some small part hoped it would. It was evil, yes, but who didn't wish to be indispensable?  
  
But he knew damn well he wasn't. The Professor was a great strategist, even if he didn't get out much; Storm could lead the team; Piotr, Rogue, Bobby, and Brendan had all shown they were at least mature enough to be a team asset; and Logan … well, if everything went horribly wrong, he'd proved he could kill every fucking thing that moved. It wasn't ideal, but it could do. He was just a guy with laser cannons for eyeballs - he was not indispensable.   
  
If Jean was still alive, why hadn't she contacted him? Because she couldn't … or wouldn't? Now that she was consorting with a god, maybe she had more in common with Logan. Maybe …  
  
Okay, now he was nuts. If Jean had contacted anyone, why did fucking Bob have to break the news to them? Bob, that bastard, that asshole, playing games with their lives like they were nothing. And they probably were to him - he was a "god", right?   
  
Scott was half way convinced Bob had a "thing" for Logan. Well, according to Bob himself, gods were neither gender, just whatever suited their will. (Camaxtli, whom he first referred to as a "she", was suddenly a "he" later on.) And why would anyone hang around Logan unless they A) lost a bet or B) liked him, for some unfathomable reason.   
  
Was that fair? Logan had actually tried to help him, in his way. And if Bob hanging around Logan meant he had a thing for him, then that would mean Camaxtli had a thing for Jean … but he could believe that. He could easily believe anyone could fall in love with Jean. How could you not?  
  
If Camaxtli hurt her, he would … what? What the fuck could he do to a god? Say he didn't believe in it? Say he worshipped Ba'al instead? He couldn't hurt Bob; he couldn't even begin to think of making a move against him - would he have any luck at all with Camaxtli, who - it had been implied - was stronger than Bob? He'd have no luck at all; he'd be dead before he could even get to the second syllable of "fuck you". (Which would teach him to curse.)  
  
"Jeannie, I wish I could still talk to you," he said to the ceiling, watching the light move. It would have been beautiful if he didn't feel so fucking lost. Lost and useless. What did he think he was accomplishing with this? He was alone and responsible for himself, but he had finally discovered the reason why he needed to be surrounded by a crowd and by noise.  
  
He couldn't stand to be alone with himself.  
  
He wondered how Logan learned to deal with it. Maybe that's why he was so generally unpleasant - it drove him crazy, and he never quite recovered. No, that didn't explain everything.  
  
He wondered if, when Jean came back, he'd know. Would they contact him? Or would they just assume he knew? Was she back now?  
  
Scott wondered when he could go back to the mansion and not feel like a failure.  
  
6  
  
He convinced her to come back to the mansion, but it was more out of curiosity than any selling on his part. She still thought there was a catch, or it was a pile of shit, but she also still thought she was clearly invincible. Logan wondered if he ever seemed that obnoxious. Well, maybe … but not really. After all, he wasn't a teenage girl, was he? Teenagers had a special corner of their own in the obnoxiousness department.  
  
He never brought up claws; he couldn't. But she didn't bring them up either, so he considered that a good sign. She didn't bring up "static" powers either, and he wasn't sure if that was for or against what his cause.  
  
Xavier had obviously planned ahead, because he'd barely put the kickstand down on the bike when Rogue came up to them, all happy and bubbly. She introduced herself to Leonie, who still seemed wary, and didn't shake Rogue's hand, just asked her why she was wearing opera gloves. He left the two of them to chat, and Rogue to show Leonie around the grounds (why Xavier had asked her to meet them), and he went inside, venturing no deeper than the inner foyer. There, he sat down heavily on a bench, and let his head fall into his hands.  
  
He was there for perhaps a minute when Xavier rolled up. "I have a friend who's willing to do a DNA test," he offered.  
  
"What do you need?"  
  
"Anything really. A sample of skin cells, a -"  
  
"A hair?" Logan felt in his coat pocket, and pulled out a single strand of bright red hair. It had fallen on the table when they got up to go, and Leonie never noticed - why should she? People shed hairs every day, just like they shed skin cells - well, normal people. He sometimes lost a hair or two, but Jean had already proved that he didn't lose skin cells, ever; they didn't die, just regenerated. He didn't know if that was true for Leonie or not, and honestly, he almost didn't want to know.   
  
"You already knew that," Xavier said, somewhat surprised.  
  
"That you knew someone who could run a DNA test? No, but I was hopin' -"  
  
"You knew a DNA sample could be pulled from a strand of hair," Xavier corrected. "Do you wonder why you know that?"  
  
He shrugged, uncomfortable with where Xavier might be going with this. "I prob'ly read it somewhere. I read a lot."  
  
Xavier's clear blue eyes remained fixed on him with an uncomfortable intensity. "Indeed."   
  
Suddenly Piotr joined them, carrying what looked like a metal case. "You wanted this Professor?" He asked, then noticed who was with him. "Oh, hey Logan."  
  
"Hey." Would he go away now?  
  
"Uh, sorry about the … uh, you know. Guy whose head was in the box."  
  
"I didn't know him; he was a friend of my girlfriend's, that's all." Wait a second - had he just said girlfriend?  
  
Even Xavier looked surprised at that, as he opened up what looked like a medical sample kit. "You have a girlfriend?"  
  
"Anyone we know?" Piotr asked, with a surprising amount of interest.  
  
Logan scowled at both of them. "Forget I said anything."  
  
"Does Rogue know?" Piotr continued, seemingly enjoying his discomfort. "She'll probably be jealous, even though she's got Bobby -"  
  
"Thank you, Piotr," Xavier said, evidently picking up on Logan's thoughts drifting towards the homicidal.  
  
Maybe Xavier gave him a mental push, because the big guy suddenly looked a little confused, as if he'd forgotten what he was talking about. "No problem," Piotr replied, then gave a friendly nod to Logan before walking off again.  
  
"He means well," Xavier said, plucking the hair from Logan's hand with a set of tweezers. He placed it inside a small plastic bag, which he quickly sealed.   
  
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions," Logan said, mostly out of reflex.  
  
Xavier smirked, looking amused. "It's paved with many things. The road to hell seems awfully well traveled."  
  
"They got an open door policy," he said wearily, getting up. "I'm - I'm gonna call the Way station, see if Bob is back yet."  
  
"Actually, a woman called here earlier for you," Xavier told him, closing the plastic bag inside the kit. "That wouldn't have been your girlfriend by any chance, would it?"  
  
He sighed, and closed his eyes so Xavier didn't see him roll them. Perhaps Piotr was the only one who didn't know about his "girlfriend". "Did she give her name as Yasha?"  
  
"Yes, she did. Is she a mutant?"  
  
He raised an eyebrow at that, and was careful to keep his thoughts neutral. "Why would you ask that?"  
  
"Well, it was a curious thing. Usually I get an empathic impression of someone over the phone, but I got nothing from her. Out of curiosity, I tried to pick up on something from her, but it was like there was no one on the other end of the line. Very strange. I assumed she had some telepathy neutralizing power."  
  
"No, she's just dead."  
  
"I beg your pardon?" His response was so perfectly deadpan it was almost funny.  
  
"She's a vampire, okay? But she's not evil, she's just …" he was tempted to say "misunderstood", if only for the joke, but decided against it. " … she's different."  
  
He blinked rapidly, trying to assimilate that and not be judgmental. "I assume there's a story behind that," he finally said.  
  
"Maybe later," Logan said, trying to swallow his own anxiety. There was just too much shit going on, and he didn't want to deal with it all right now. "How long will it take your friend to run a DNA test?"  
  
"Well, thanks to having Static's DNA on file, we should have at least a partial answer by the end of the day."   
  
Static's DNA on file? Must be the same person who "took care of" her body - whoever that was. "Do they have mine too?"  
  
Xavier reluctantly admitted, "Jean shared your blood sample."  
  
He grunted an acknowledgement, not surprised, and walked down the hall, headed towards Xavier's office. "Let me know as soon as you know." He hoped his anxiety wasn't coming through loud and clear, but it probably was. It was bad enough if Leonie was some kind of cobbled together cloning experiment, but it could be very much worse.  
  
Logan wondered if he'd left Xia's number around somewhere, and if she'd know if he and Sloane ever had a daughter. 


	4. Part 4

6  
  
Bob should have known that Cammy would lead him here.  
  
He stumbled on a plane made soft and malleable by magma, with a frail crust of hardened, black rock floating on top of the angry red sea like pond scum.  
  
"Why are you here, Imperfect One? I thought I told you never to return here!" A voice boomed, as he struggled to keep his footing on the loose rock.  
  
The realm of Angra Mainyu. Fuck! Cammy was calling in all his chits. "Point me after Camaxtli and I'm on my way," he said, deciding to become semi-corporeal so he didn't have to worry about getting charred by lava.  
  
Angra Mainyu - Angie - currently looked like the widest humanoid in existence, his shoulders as broad as an outhouse door. But the entirety of his face was hidden by a mask of intricately carved gold, that ended in two sharp wings that curved around the side of his head, highlighting the crimson feathers growing out of his scalp. His eyes showed through slits in the masks, bubbling pools of magma, and he didn't exist from the waist down - he'd made himself partially intangible, to better pass through his realm of seething heat.  
  
And this realm was all boiling lava and jagged black atolls of stone, that rose from the violent red sea like daggers attempting to pierce the heart of the scalding yellow sun up above. It was not the classic Human version of Hell, but it was close enough for rock and roll. All it needed were souls in endless torment.  
  
But nothing lived here without Angie's permission, and he hated people, in torment or not. He also hated most gods, with few exceptions - and Cammy was one of those. Destructive gods just seemed to band together - until they get it into their heads to destroy one another, which didn't happen as much as you would think. They were usually evenly matched … but who matched up to Angie?  
  
To the Zoroastrians, he was the personification and creator of evil, the god of darkness and destroyer of all that was good; basically Satan. But since Satan was a rather generic term for about a dozen different hell gods, it wasn't applicable here. He wasn't a hell god at all - he was just a god who really, really liked to break stuff, and was terribly good at it. Didn't matter what it was - inanimate objects, people, worlds, universes, gods. He was created simply to smash stuff, and he loved his job.  
  
"Are you the one that hurt him?!" Angie roared, sounding like an avalanche.  
  
"This is a fight between us," he warned. "Stay out of it."  
  
A geyser of lava erupted in front of him, knocking him back on his semi-corporeal ass, and singeing his hair. "You want to find Camaxtli, you go through me first!" He proclaimed, as wonderfully bombastic as a half man in the campiest mask this side of a gay pride parade could be.  
  
Oh wonderful. Bob had a feeling this was really going to hurt in the morning.  
  
***  
  
Logan was surprised that he was so tired, but he couldn't remember the last time he actually got some sleep. Okay, he was drugged or maybe knocked out by a spell - how could you tell? - but did that count? It probably wasn't restful.  
  
Bob wasn't back, and his attempt to get a hold of Xia didn't pan out. So what else did he have to do but fret about what Leonie's relationship to Static - or him - might be?  
  
But right off the bat it was a complete bust. He laid down on his bed and heard everything going on in the school (the kids outside, the ones inside and down the hall, the ones watching t.v. all the way down in the lounge), until he made a conscious effort to block it all out. Sometimes it was hard not to listen.  
  
It was a hell of a coincidence, wasn't it? First Blaster Boy shows up - and disappears again - and now a potential clone (or daughter, or something there wasn't a technical name for) shows up, just in time for him to find her. It could have been random chance, and certainly his luck sucked like an airplane toilet, but it seemed like too much, too far a reach. There was something going on here … what he couldn't even begin to fathom, but something.  
  
He was still trying to tie the loose, unconnected threads together when he drifted off to sleep.  
  
He didn't realize that until he woke up in the garden.  
  
Logan sat up, wondering if he'd been sleepwalking (sleep rampaging?), when he noticed the sky was a streaked red and orange, like flames. "Jean?" He asked, wondering if it was her or Camaxtli. What was he saying? They were pretty much inseparable, weren't they? But had he finally violated the sanctity of her "happy place"? Oh fuck, why not? He was the colossal dick of all dick gods, and that was saying something.  
  
As he climbed to his feet, still feeling a little muzzy, and he suddenly realized he would rather deal with Camaxtli than Jean, considering what went on last time.   
  
"Logan," she said, her voice causing his gut to twist in anxiety. "Something's wrong."  
  
More fucking with him, huh? Sure, why not? He turned to face her. She was standing beside a hedgerow - in fact, it looked like she was leaning on it. It was a trap, another kind of trick, he knew it, and yet he played his part all the same. "What? What is it?" He went to her, held out a hand to help her, then hesitated, as he didn't know how.  
  
She took his arm, though, fingers digging in tight as if she was hanging on to him for dear life, and then she did lean against him heavily, almost making him stumble. She wasn't kidding. He visually scanned her for injuries, then wondered what the hell he was doing - this was a mindscape, and it didn't work like that - and he tried to steady her on her feet. She looked normal, but a little pale, and maybe the fire in her eyes wasn't so bright. "Jeannie, what's wrong?" He asked, mentally kicking himself for being played as a sucker so easily.  
  
But she really did look confused when she glanced at him; lost and human. "I - I'm not really sure. It's like …" As she struggled for words, she seemed to regain some strength, stood up straighter, removed her fingernails from his arm. "There's never been a mental transition like this that's taken so much out of me. It's like I almost couldn't do it. Usually, it's as easy and instinctive as breathing."  
  
Could what Bob was doing to Camaxtli - whatever he was doing to Camaxtli - be hurting Jean too? Oh fuck, what if Camaxtli's death meant Jean's death too?   
  
Her eyes searched his, brows drawing down in puzzlement, and he belatedly realized she was picking up his thoughts. Shit, he really was tired. "Jean-"  
  
"He really isn't dead, is he?"  
  
It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out she meant Camaxtli. "No, he's not. Bob is … I think he's trying to save you, to get rid of Camaxtli, but … I don't know what the fuck's going on exactly. Do I ever?"  
  
He was still holding on to her arms, and he could feel her skin getting warmer. Her color was looking a little better too; she was recovering from whatever that blip was. But obviously it had shocked her, scared her badly, and he wondered if it was just a momentary thing, or the first sign of an inevitable decline. "I'm not sure what's going on either. I'm trying to remember … what was the last thing I did?"  
  
"I hope you're not asking me."  
  
"No, I -" She paused again, but her look was wholly internal; he might as well have not been here. "Why can't I remember?"  
  
"Maybe there's somethin' he doesn't want you to remember." That was the better option of the other possibility - that she was so rarely in control of herself that there was nothing to remember; Camaxtli was in the driver's seat.  
  
(If it was actually her - how did he know?)  
  
Her gaze was like a spotlight when it turned on him, bright and questing. "When was the last time we met, Logan?"  
  
He felt stupid, but he couldn't help it. "I ain't sure, darlin'. I couldn't always tell when it was you or Camaxtli. He fucks with your head pretty good."  
  
"I don't care. When was the last time you met with him or me?"  
  
He looked away to avoid those fiery eyes. The garden was starting to look better, more green in the reddish tinged light, and the sky seemed more alive. "Hon, I had a confrontation with him not too long ago. That's when Bob stepped in and started bitch slapping him."  
  
"A confrontation?"  
  
"It wasn't anything," he told her, then looked around, as if trying to orient himself in this new landscape. The mansion was gone - why had he never noticed that before? There was nothing but more greenery, acres of trees and flowering plants, an explosion of twisting vines with purple and red flowers as livid as wounds against bark and stems brown and green. On the one hand, it was somewhat beautiful, but on the other there was something inherently eerie in its construction; it gave a sense of not only being out of control, but perhaps completely beyond it. The physical representation of a mind starting to lose its own moorings.   
  
"Why are you avoiding this?" Her voice had taken on a sharp edge.  
  
He still wouldn't face her. "It's not important."  
  
"I think it is."  
  
"It's not."  
  
"Why won't you even look at me?"  
  
He was starting to feel something in his mind, tendrils of energy like fingers brushing over his frontal lobe, and he spun around to face her, furious and terrified in equal measure. "Stop it! Wanna know why I won't say? 'Cause you'll hate me for the rest of your fucking life, Jean! Let it go!"  
  
But it was too late, and he knew it. That terrible fire bloomed in her eyes, and suddenly -   
  
- there he was, back on that gray beach again. "Don't!" He shouted, dropping to his knees in the sand, covering his head with his arms as he tried to block her out, or at least hold the memories in. But even without Camaxtli in the forefront, she had access to some of his powers, and he still couldn't fight a god. "Don't make me live through this ag-"  
  
But then it was over, just like that. He opened his eyes, breathing as hard as if he'd just run a marathon, and found himself kneeling in the grass. He could feel her eyes burning into him before he dared to lift his head and look up.  
  
Her expression seemed torn between horror and fury, and he knew that feeling all too well. "You killed me?" She gasped.  
  
"Not you," he insisted, still angry at her for the violation, and shaken by the memories themselves. She could have no idea what it took for him to do that, how he had to will himself to the edge of madness, and fall over it. "Never you. I know it sounds like bullshit right now, but I would never hurt you. Camaxtli is dead on the higher realms, he has no other place to go; you're it. When he manifests on the Earth plane with you he will hollow you out, even if he doesn't mean to. He's a god, and that's what they do to their vessels. You'll be nothing but his shell, Jean - he'll kill everything inside you and leave nothing but himself behind. I killed him, not you." He had to close his eyes, swallow back tears that clogged his throat. It still shook him to the core, and was perhaps worse with the knowledge he might have to do it again. But he couldn't think about that now, or he'd completely lose it. "I would die before I hurt you. You have to believe that."  
  
When he was sure he could, he opened his eyes, and was surprised to find her kneeling in the grass before him, staring through him with those eyes of fire. He wanted to look away, but couldn't; he was impaled. "You-" she said, and her expression was full of wonder. "You were trying to take my place?"  
  
"I'm expendable; I'm easier for them to kill too."  
  
He couldn't read the look in her eerie eyes, and when she took his face in her hands, he had the sudden thought that she was going to snap his neck - one savage twist, and it would be all over. And maybe that wouldn't be so bad. It would in fact be poetically ironic if it was Jean that killed him, considering what he had tried to do her. He could have fought, but he had no desire to; just let her do whatever she was going to do. He would deserve it.  
  
But there were tears welling in her eyes, as if mimicking his own. "I can see the truth so easily now," she said, apropos of nothing. Then she kissed him.  
  
Logan knew it had to be Camaxtli; it had to be another trick, a lure to spring yet another trap on him. But her kiss felt so good, as did the tendrils of energy he could feel sneaking into his body. But they didn't feel invasive, and seemed to set off no mental tripwires; they were just heat and power.  
  
He didn't resist her, even as she pushed him back on the grass. He was wondering what he'd get this time - still beating heart ripped out of his chest? Guts torn out? Maybe she'd just rip his head off.   
  
But she never stopped kissing him, and even though he knew this was a set-up like before, his traitorous body was responding to her. She did feel like Jean, smell like her … but she was her, just … not alone. She was in his mind again, and he was losing the plot among all the sensations. Apparently there were as many pluses as minuses when involved with a telepath.  
  
He thought he felt her hands on his body, moving up his chest, and he was vaguely aware of his own hands moving up her back, beneath her shirt, when a trill of pleasure shuddered down his spine. God, she was so warm, and for some reason he was so cold - it was strangely pleasurable when they merged. She tasted like power.  
  
Mentally he was trying to distance himself from this, but her skin was so soft, her muscles so taut, her body pressing into him so strongly … it was getting progressively harder to think. He didn't want to think anymore, he didn't want to brace himself for the inevitable evil twist (maybe she'd rip his dick off - now that would be funny), he just wanted to be with her. Have what they never had in the real world.  
  
And maybe that was the weakness Camaxtli was preying on.  
  
7  
  
Bob hit the ground face first, and since he was now fully corporeal, that really fucking hurt.  
  
He shoved himself up to a sitting position, still tasting energy in his mouth and aching like an open wound, and was a little surprised to feel what seemed like small napped carpet.  
  
But looking around, he confirmed it: he was in an office building.  
  
Beige on brown carpet, white walls of cubicles stretching on into infinity. The sound of printers and copy machines in use filled his ears, just as the reek of toner filled his nostrils. Overhead florescent lights made everything look harsh and unpleasant, and as he stood up, he saw there were no windows on the outer walls, just corkboards covered with memos.  
  
What kind of sick, twisted hell dimension was this?  
  
"Why are you here?" A voice asked. "Do you have a pass?"  
  
Bob wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, and figured he was lucky to still have his hair after a fight with Angie. He didn't want to even fight him, he just did until he could buy some time and get the fuck out of there - gods knew Camaxtli had already scarpered. He turned to face the voice, and was utterly gob smacked to see it was, "Balor?" He exclaimed. You could have knocked him over with a sheep fart.  
  
Balor looked like a paunchy middle manager, complete with thinning brown hair combed over his thinning pate in such a way as to make him look like a pathetic joke. He wore the khakis and pinstriped white shirt open at the color, his navy tied pulled loose, sleeves rolled up to reveal hairy forearms and a reasonable quality platinum Timex, and could have walked into any office anywhere and passed - as long as you didn't look above his neck, or below the crown of his head.  
  
His face was just one gigantic eye. An eye sealed with duct tape.  
  
Oh, there was a mouth, a tiny horizontal slash between the massive lid and knife sharp chin, but it was hard to see. Balor was another death god - this one attributed to Celtic mythology - and he killed by simply looking upon things with his single, massive eye, which is why most of the time he covered it or - in a nod to the modern day - taped it down. It wasn't just that he killed everything he saw, but the eye was his weak point; the only way to kill Balor was to rip out his death eye. So he was very protective of it. "Bob? That you?" He asked curiously, his voice betraying a slight Irish lilt. "What're you doing in this neck o' the woods?"  
  
"I'm chasing Camaxtli."  
  
"Oh. He's still alive?"  
  
"Until I catch him."  
  
"I thought he was stronger than you?"  
  
"I doubled up; I powered Itchy's power."  
  
"Cammy's mate?"  
  
"Yep."  
  
"Was he cool with that?"  
  
"No, he's dead."  
  
"Ah. It happens."  
  
"Indeed. Where did Cammy go?"  
  
Balor shrugged his surprisingly slender shoulders. "I dunno. I wasn't paying any attention." He held up his hand, and a folder suddenly appeared in it. "Lots of paperwork."  
  
"Is there another war on?"  
  
"Several, in fact. Death is my business, and business is always fabulous. It's a growth industry."  
  
"Sadly, yeah. Uh, gotta jet here."  
  
"Are you sure? Ya know, what with all the business, I was thinking of outsourcing -"  
  
Bob quickly walked past him, shaking his head, unable to believe that Balor was actually trying to hire him. "Thanks, mate, but ya know I don't like the death thing."  
  
"Your loss."  
  
He paused at the end of the aisle, and glanced back at him. "Hey Bal, you don't happen to know what's wrong with Cammy, do ya?"  
  
"Wrong? Oh, he's dyin'. That's why I asked if he was still alive. Kinda surprisin', but the war gods go down hard. 'Cept Ares, but hey, you were there, I don't have to tell ya about that. He was always a bit of a pouf though, wasn't he? Always blustering and swanning about -"  
  
"Dying?" He knew Balor couldn't be mistaken; death was his thing, after all. But while he knew he hit him hard with his and Itchy's combined energy when he saw him threatening Logan, the blow was not fatal - he could only wish that it was. But if Cammy was weakened from something else … "Why is he dying?"  
  
He shrugged again, gesturing helplessly with ink stained hands. "I don't know the details, just that he's on my to-do list. I'm a big picture kinda guy. You want the specs, ask Erra, Nechustan, or Dagda; the details are more their department."  
  
"I will, thanks," he lied. Actually, once he cornered Cammy, he could ask him, if he'd bother to tell him the truth.  
  
What the fuck was going on here? What had happened to Camaxtli?  
  
***  
  
When Logan woke up, he was so disoriented he reached for Jean.  
  
Of course she wasn't here. He opened his eyes, and confirmed what his other senses were telling him: he was in his room at the mansion.   
  
He groaned and rubbed his eyes, feeling even more exhausted than when he laid down in the first place. But he didn't exactly get much restful sleep, did he?  
  
As he sat up, he wondered if that had actually happened, or if it was just a dream. Really strange, vivid dream, wasn't it? He would swear he could still feel her, her lips brushing his skin, the curve of her hip beneath his hand, the warmth of her flesh …  
  
Wow, he really needed to take a cold shower.  
  
While he cleaned up, he wondered if it was becoming pathological, an attempt to wash away all that stained his "unclean" soul. It was a thought worth entertaining at the very least; maybe it could be a hobby.  
  
She never did kill him, which made him wonder if Camaxatli was getting more clever. Establish an intimacy between him and "Jean", and maybe he couldn't find the inner madness to kill her. He feared he was right; Logan wasn't sure he could repeat the act even before they slept together.  
  
Well … did it count? It was on the mental plane, so technically it didn't, and yet it felt real enough. But he wondered if it was actually Jean he was with, or Camaxtli. Or did Camaxtli push her, sway her in a certain way? If he could play with his sense, he could surely screw with Jean's mind.  
  
So why didn't he stop himself? Why didn't he stop her if he thought there was any doubts about her motivation? What a stupid question. Because he wanted her, that's why, and he still did. And that's why he now suspected, in retrospect, the whole scenario had been engineered.  
  
But damn him, Jean was his weakness, and that bastard knew it. He was going to work that weakness and exploit it any way he could. So Logan would have to learn to inure himself to it, or find some way to get over Jean. Right now, neither seemed within the realm of possibility.  
  
He was getting dressed, wondering how long he had been asleep, when there was a knock on the door. Oh god, he so didn't need to talk to Xavier now. He pulled up his jeans, and barked, "Yeah, what?"  
  
The door opened, and Rogue poked her head in. "Well howdy to you too, Mister Sunshine."  
  
He scowled at her, but was secretly glad it was her and not Xavier; now he had more time to burying the memory of him and Jean making love. "What is it?"  
  
She came in uninvited and shut the door, leaning against it as if trying to keep a rampaging horde out. But she just stared at him for what seemed like a full half minute, then said, "If Brendan knew you were shirtless, and I didn't call him in here, he'd be so pissed off," she noted, with a mischievous smile.  
  
He angrily yanked a black t-shirt on over his head, and snapped, "Are you just here to ogle, or do you have a point?"  
  
"Can't it be both?" She teased, but at the look on his face, she quickly sobered up. "Actually, it's about Leonie."  
  
Oh great, problem number two. "What about her? Has she killed someone?"  
  
"Not yet. The thing is … she's lyin', Logan. Is she in some kinda trouble or something?"  
  
"Lying? About what?"  
  
"Well … to start off, Bobby has an Aunt in Toronto, so he asked which part of it she was from, and it took her a long time to come up with a name, and when she did scrounge one up, Bobby had never heard of it. And when Bren asked her how many foster home's she'd been in - 'cause you know, he's been bouncin' around lots of 'em since his Mom went to prison - she didn't seem to know. Then she said she'd just been in the one, for as long as she could remember, but Bren thought that was weird, 'specially since they didn't adopt her. But the Canadian foster system could be different, so -"  
  
"Maybe she just doesn't wanna talk about her past," he said, sympathizing with her. But he also knew, combined with what he already suspected about her, this wasn't good.   
  
"And I could understand that," she agreed. "I wasn't too eager to either, ya know. But I don't think she actually knows, Logan. She looked like it had never even occurred to her before."  
  
Memory loss? Did she have no memories too? How fucking suspicious was that, if true? Could susceptibility to amnesia be congenital? "Where is she now?" He asked, sitting down and hastily pulling on his boots.  
  
"Piotr was showing her the gym, I think they're still there. Apparently she has a buttload of black belts."  
  
"Really?" Could fighting ability be genetic? He may have technically been the muscle, but Sloane - from what he'd heard - was hardly a slouch when it came to fighting. "You tell Xavier about this?"  
  
"Naw. I don't know where he is, and besides, you brought her in. I thought maybe, ya know, she was your problem to deal with."  
  
He frowned, but her logic was impeccable. And how much time had passed, exactly? Maybe Xavier wasn't even here - maybe he was visiting that mysterious medico "friend" of his. He stood up and gestured at the door, and they left, Rogue needlessly leading the way to the gym. They were half way there - and he noticed through the corridor windows that the sun was just starting to set, turning the light a pale golden orange - when he asked, "What do ya think of her? Leonie?"  
  
"Despite bein' a liar?" She shrugged. "She kinda reminds me of you. In the beginnin', I mean. She doesn't trust anyone, and she acts like she's expecting us to attack her with a big net or something."  
  
Could paranoia be genetic? Or was that the missing piece of the puzzle? Did they do the same thing to her that they had done to him? Just the thought of it made his heart skip a beat, and he was instantly furious on her behalf. Doing it to him was one thing, but a child … assholes! Motherfucking, limp dicked assholes! If they weren't dead, they'd be soon wishing they were.  
  
Rogue glanced back at him, and must have seen the anger in his eyes, because she asked, "You know what her deal is?"  
  
"Not exactly. But I think I'm starting to."  
  
She looked at him questioningly, but they'd already hit the gym, so she had no chance to ask.   
  
Piotr was standing beside the new heavy bag (maybe this one hung on a more sturdy chain) as Leonie drove a few solid upcuts into the opposite side. "-form," he was saying, clearly being encouraging. He looked towards the door, and said, "Hey. Did you know she has-"  
  
Piotr never got to finish that sentence. While his attention was diverted, he didn't notice Leonie spin into a back kick that hit the bag high, and sent it smashing back into his face.   
  
Maybe if he was armored up he could have ignored it, but he wasn't, and got knocked back flat on his ass, his bottom lip bleeding from the surprise impact. "Hey," Logan snapped, even though it was an accident.   
  
"What?" Leonie said. Her eyes had a slightly wild look to them, as if sparring had given her a major adrenaline rush. "It ain't my fault he wasn't paying attention."  
  
Rogue had gone over to Piotr, and was giving Leonie a rather cold glare. "You okay?" Logan asked him.  
  
He nodded, wiping the back of his hand across his bottom lip, pulling away a streak of blood. "Yeah, fine. Bruised ego, nothing major."  
  
"So, you teach self-defense, huh?" Leonie said, and it may have been mocking - her voice was so sharp though, it was almost hard to tell. "Let's see what you got."  
  
He glared at her. "You don't wanna see what I've got."  
  
She danced across the mat lightly, hands raised slightly in an open offense position. "Ah, come on old man, afraid to get your ass beat?"  
  
Rogue barked a sharp, derisive laugh. "Oh yeah. You'll succeed where a squadron of armed soldiers failed," she said witheringly, shooting Leonie a look to match.  
  
But Leonie ignored her, and darted forward, feigning a punch. Logan easily deflected it with his forearm, turning her fist away so she didn't hurt herself. "Stop this now," he demanded, blocking another punch on the left side in a similar manner.   
  
She didn't listen. She smiled, and tried a faster flurry, which was still not connecting. "Wow old man, you're fast."  
  
He started moving in, making her back up. "Knock it off, Leonie. I could hurt you."  
  
"Fuck you," she spat, and he could smell it in her sweat; adrenaline and panic. Was he scaring her, or was it her own inability to control herself? "No one hurts me."  
  
She made to throw another punch, but quickly spun into a back kick, yet he anticipated the move, seeing how she shifted her weight to her front foot. He ducked back, letting her heel just miss his face by a half inch, and as she spun back around, he hit her with a simple leg sweep that sent her sprawling on the mat before she could even bring her second foot down. He didn't want to hurt her, healing factor or not, but he hoped she realized he could have done a hell of a lot worse than just take her legs out from under her. "Play time's over," he told her. "I think it's time you and me had a talk."  
  
She glared up at him, her emerald eyes almost incandescent with hate. Problems controlling anger - environmental, genetic, or both? "You think I'm playing?" She snarled. She shoved herself off the mat violently, jumping to her feet and moving to attack in one smooth movement. She was very limber, he had to give her that.  
  
She threw another punch, a blistering one going for his throat (okay, that was good strategy - no matter how tough a person was, the throat was usually a very vulnerable spot, and there were no bones there big enough to break your own knuckles on), but rather than deflect it he stepped aside and slid in behind her, grabbing both her arms before she had time to react, and pinning them to her body in a stifling bear hug. She still struggled, and she was stronger than he would ever have imagined. Didn't Static have better than average strength? "Let me the fuck go!" She shouted, still struggling in vain to pull her arms free from his grasp. But as strong as she was, he was still stronger.  
  
"Not until you knock this off," he growled, nearing the limit of his patience. "What is it you're trying to prove?"  
  
"That I'm better than you group of pathetic freaks," she snapped, and brought her heel down hard on his instep and smashed the back of her head into his face.  
  
It was a fine strategy that would have worked if he hadn't had metal on his bones. It still hurt, especially the smashing down on his foot, and his lip split open like Piotr's when it got wedged between her skull and his own bottom row of teeth. But it was Leonie that barked a pained, startled, "Fuck!"   
  
He didn't just let her go, he shoved her away, and she stumbled. She managed to keep on her feet, but grabbed the back of her head and stayed bent over for a moment, as if waiting for the room to stop spinning. "I have adamantium laced bones," he told her angrily. "Do you know how stupid that was? You could have given yourself a concussion!" Although, if circumstances were different, he would have commended her; that was a very good breaking free maneuver when your opponent had your arms pinned from behind. In fact, it was almost eerie how well trained she was. She reminded him - just a little bit - of himself.  
  
Rogue looked at him, and started to ask him something - probably "Are you all right?" judging from her look - but he waved off the question. As she pointed out earlier, Leonie wasn't very likely to hurt him. At least they hadn't put any adamantium in her.  
  
When Leonie did look up at him again, tears of rage and pain sparkling in her eyes, his lip had already healed over, so she missed seeing what little damage she had managed to do. "You people are weak," she snarled. "You're coddled in here. You have no idea what it's like in the real world."  
  
"I wish you knew how ironic it was that you're saying that to Logan," Xavier's clipped, patrician voice said, and they all looked to see him roll in the open gym doors. He stopped inside the doorway, coming no further inside, but he had no reason to. When his eyes settled on Leonie, they were strangely kind. "I think he was right; it's time for us to talk."  
  
Leonie's hard eyes widened slightly, and Logan had no idea why until she snapped, "Goddamn telepath. Trying to get into my head?" Her green eyes fogged over, as if eclipsed by storm clouds, and Xavier suddenly grunted in pain, grabbing his forehead. "Think again."  
  
Oh great. They just confirmed she had Static's power as well. 


	5. Part 5

"Stop it," Logan ordered.  
  
But Leonie had no desire to stop. "What, intending to influence me or something, huh? I don't think so, asshole."  
  
"Damn it." Logan really didn't want to cold cock a girl, so he looked at Rogue and said, "Marie." At her quizzical look, he jerked his head towards Leonie.  
  
She followed his thinking, but scowled at him all the same, not wanting to even briefly absorb any of her. Still, she bit the fingertip of her glove and used her teeth to pull it off, then grabbed Leonie's arm with her bare hand.   
  
"What the fuck -" Leonie began, turning to Rogue with a sense of violence.  
  
But Rogue had been trying to learn how to regulate her powers of "stealing", and poured it on, making Leonie wince as veins suddenly stood out in relief against her pale skin, and her eyes unclouded - while Rogue's clouded up, veins spider webbing across her own face.  
  
Xavier looked up, taking a shaky breath, and said, "Thank you."  
  
Rogue let go of Leonie, who staggered back a step, but Rogue's eyes remained clouded over for a full minute before they returned to normal. "That's one weird power you got there," she noted, rubbing her own head.   
  
"What the fuck did you just do, bitch?" Leonie roared, getting back her strength back with her rage. But Logan grabbed her other arm and pulled her out of reach of Rogue.  
  
"She borrows other people's powers," he informed her. "But she can borrow them all if she wants, so knock it off when I tell ya to knock it off."  
  
She yanked her arm away violently, and glared at him. "You don't order me around, perve. I don't have to do jack shit."  
  
"We are not your enemy," Xavier told her.   
  
"Fuck you! I don't know any of you! You're all-"  
  
"What's your last name?" Logan interrupted.  
  
That stopped her dead. She looked back at him, her eyes getting that wild, cornered animal look again. "What?"  
  
"Your last name - what is it? What about the name of your foster parents? Do you remember that?"  
  
She stared at him, and he could smell the panic coming back full force. "Wh-why the fuck do you wanna know?! What's your fucking last name?!"  
  
"I don't know. I've never known. What about you?"  
  
She started backing up, towards the door, and was giving them all a hollow eyed look now. He'd hit the absolutely right - or wrong, depending on your point of view - buttons, and all she wanted to do was run. "Just fuck off! I don't know what your deal is, and I don't give a fuck!"  
  
"We might be able to help each other, Leonie," he told her. "The people who fucked with your head are the same people who fucked with mine."  
  
"Logan, what are you saying?" Rogue asked, sounding shocked.   
  
"Nobody fucked with my head," she snapped, and the stench of fear was starting to come off her as strong as vinegar. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but I am so out of here." She turned and started stalking towards Xavier, and Logan knew in her current state she might hurt him to get him out of her way, so he quickly went after her.  
  
Xavier, for his part, was unafraid. "We can help you find some answers."  
  
"I don't need any answers," she snarled, and pulled back her fist.  
  
The gesture was familiar, but even Logan didn't expect the claws that shot out of her hand.  
  
Rogue let out a surprised yelp, Piotr went wide eyed with shock, but Xavier wasn't at all surprised, which probably told him more than he wanted to know. "Outta my way, old man," she growled.  
  
Logan grabbed her from behind, and turned around, shoving her farther back into the room and putting himself between her and Xavier. "Put those away now," he said, feeling like an idiot. What the fuck was he, her dad?   
  
Oh god - apparently yes.  
  
"You -" Rogue said, but since she was looking between him and Leonie, he wasn't sure which one of them she was addressing.   
  
"You wanna get gutted?!" Leonie threatened him, holding up her gleaming ivory claws. There were minute streaks of blood on them, and it looked like blood was beading at the base. She was a fast healer, but not quite as fast as him. He wondered if that meant something. "Get the fuck out of my way or get shredded!"  
  
"You wanted to see what I had, darlin'? Okay, I'll show you," he said, and popped his own claws on both hands.  
  
It got the reaction he expected. Her jaw went instantly slack, and her eyes were riveted to his hands, her surly rage being drowned in bone deep shock. "How -" she said, and stopped, aware that her claws no longer seemed that impressive. At least his were metal.  
  
"Yer welcome to try shreddin' me," he told her archly. "But somehow I don't think I'm gonna be the one hurtin'."  
  
"Oh god," Rogue gasped. "She's yours, isn't she?"  
  
That made Leonie look at Rogue in wide eyed shock. "What? What d'ya mean -" But then Leonie's eyes scudded back to him, and the look on her face was so wounded he didn't know if she was going to cry, vomit, or try and rip his face off. "No."  
  
He retracted his claws, and asked, "Are ya ready to talk now?"  
  
She withdrew her own claws, but with great reluctance. "If you knew who the fuck I was, why didn't ya tell me?!" She shouted angrily, tears welling in her eyes.  
  
"I didn't know. I suspected, but I wasn't sure. Are we sure now, Chuck?"  
  
"Yes, but it's not quite as cut and dried as you think."  
  
No, nothing was, was it? "I'm sure. Can we go to his office and talk about it, or should we announce it to the rest of the school?"  
  
She continued to stare at him, trembling from rage, tears welling in her eyes but not yet falling. "Is my mother here too?"  
  
"No." He decided to leave out the fact that she was dead, because she was having a hard enough time dealing with all of this. Not that he was having an easy time of it himself, but hey, he was the adult here, and he may as well act like it. Besides, hadn't he always feared he had family out there somewhere? Family he wouldn't know if it came up and bit him on the ass.  
  
Sometimes he hated his life.  
  
Wait a minute - sometimes? Every single fucking hour of every single fucking day.  
  
9  
  
Perhaps he was under the delusion that things would get easier once they were in the secluded confines of Xavier's office. If so, then he needed his head examined. Anew.  
  
Leonie refused to get anywhere near him, and kept looking at him funny. He figured she was probably thinking "Where the hell have you been all my life?", but could not, in fact, remember her life, so she couldn't recall if he had actually been there or not. There was nothing worse than a snit aborted mid-stream.   
  
When Logan declined to sit, Leonie did, but fidgeted uncomfortably, and he knew she probably hated him for being able to pace. Well, he never expected to win father of the year.  
  
As Xavier briefed Leonie aloud on a somewhat cleaned up and abbreviated version of Logan's connection to the Organization, he heard, in his head, *I think there are some things the girl shouldn't hear right now.*  
  
He almost nodded, but stopped himself. Would it matter? She wasn't even looking his way. *Agreed. So she's mine and Sloane's?*  
  
*Absolutely, positive DNA match on both you. But there were some oddities.*  
  
*I gathered. Such as?*  
  
*Well, for one thing, Static had clearly never given birth to a child. And there were some … unusual aspects to Leonie's DNA.*  
  
*Unusual?*  
  
*Her mutations seemed extremely specific. My friend seemed to think she showed every sign of being quite well engineered.*  
  
Logan wished he was surprised, but he wasn't. *So she was tailored to be the best of both worlds? To have Static's power and mine in one package? Building a better weapon.*  
  
*It would seem so.*  
  
*Well, at least they gave her Sloane's looks.*  
  
Xavier paused to give him a wry smile, then went on telling Leonie about the Organization being an "espionage" group that hadn't treated mutants "very well" (understatement of the millennium), and Logan working for them but getting his memory "wiped out". Xavier then wrapped things up by saying the group had attacked the mansion recently, and they were all lucky to be alive. "So, what, you think I'm a spy for them or somethin'?" She asked defensively, clearly not happy with any of this.  
  
Before Logan could ask if she indeed was, Xavier reassured her, "No, not at all. But you must understand it is vital we know exactly where you came from, and what memories - if any at all - that you have. It's more than likely that they did the same thing to your mind that they did to Logan's."  
  
She ran her hands through her hair nervously, and said, "Look, I - I don't know. Why would they fuck with my head? You ain't gonna tell me I'm some kinda spy, are you?"  
  
"No, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were training you for the role," Xavier said kindly. The sky visible through the window behind him was the color of blood oranges, and it briefly brought to mind Jean's new, slightly altered "happy place" before he quickly squelched the thought. He really didn't need to think about that now, and certainly not with the risk of Xavier picking it up. "That's why it's imperative you tell us what you can remember."  
  
"But I don't - look, I'm just a bored suburban kid, no matter who my dad supposedly is."  
  
"Can you tell us the name of your foster parents at least? Give us an address?"  
  
Her shoulders slumped, and she wrung her hands together nervously in her lap. "I-I don't … you're just gonna contact them, aren't you?"  
  
"Absolutely not," Xavier assured her. "Not if you don't want us to. We'd just like to know who they are."  
  
Unaware if Xavier was still on his wavelength or not, he thought, *She doesn't heal as fast as me. Any idea why?*  
  
There was a long pause, but Xavier finally thought back, *There seems to be some conflicts between your genes and Static's. While they made them work together, the girl may suffer some physical effects from them. She has roughly four mutations, and it's … difficult.*  
  
It was weird to hear hesitation in a telepath's thought stream. *Is she dying?*  
  
*Not yet. But she may be robbed of several years due to her conflicted physical state.*  
  
Maybe that was good, in a way. Maybe she didn't have to look forward to a pointless existence that droned on and on, while everything and everyone died around her - if she could even remember them.  
  
"Their names are … Paul, and … Tammy? Yeah, I think Tammy."  
  
"You think?" Logan repeated. She was just grasping at straws; she really didn't know.  
  
Xavier held up a hand to stay him, or keep her from making a smart ass remark; he really didn't know which. "Any last name?"  
  
She was silent for several seconds, fidgeting in her chair, once again playing with her hair nervously. "Morton? No … Mason. Definitely Mason." She nodded, as if that somehow made it that much more correct.   
  
"Address?" Xavier persisted gently. He had an amazing way of being demanding without seemingly like it in the least.  
  
That took her longer. She was quiet yet fidgety for what seemed like several minutes, even though Logan knew it was only seconds. He heard every squeak of the leather seat, and it took all his concentration not to hear her nervously racing heart, but he could do nothing to block the smell of her fear. He bet she didn't like to think about these things, so she didn't have to recall all the gaps in her own knowledge. He felt a terrible sympathy for her, and knew she should, because she was related to him, and what a special kind of hell that must be. "Arkham Street, I remember that much," she finally conceded. "North Hill area, if that makes sense."  
  
"Nothing else?"  
  
"No."  
  
Xavier glanced at him, and he heard in his mind, *That make any sense to you?*  
  
He shrugged, but she wasn't looking at him, so he got away with it. *There could be a North Hill area in Toronto, but I've never heard of an Arkham Street. Doesn't mean there isn't one, though; could have changed something since the last time I was there.*  
  
Xavier sat forward, clasping his hands together on the neat surface of his desk. "I was wondering if you would allow me permission to look into your mind. I promise I wouldn't-"  
  
"No," she snapped, almost bolting up from her chair. The smell of fear spiked dramatically. "I don't want you in my head."  
  
"He's not one of the bad guys," Logan told her. "He's not going to fuck around in there."  
  
She looked at him for the first time in a long while, and the look was far from pleasant. "I don't like telepaths."  
  
"Neither do I. But he's okay."  
  
"Why don't you like telepaths?" Xavier asked, although Logan thought the question was self-evident. But just because it was self-evident to him didn't mean it was to her.  
  
Leonie switched her suspicious gaze from Logan to Xavier. "Because ... because, that's why. I don't like them."  
  
*Her head's been fucked over too,* he thought ruefully. Logan knew a knee jerk, atavistic response when he heard one, and that was it. She probably didn't remember it, but that hate was not a mindless one - she'd been hurt, even if she didn't have a specific memory of it.  
  
*Agreed* Xavier thought back at him. He thought he picked up a trace of regret in that.  
  
"It might help us find you some answers," Xavier said gently, even though Logan knew he'd already resolved himself to her saying no.  
  
He was glad, because then her response wasn't a disappointment. "What answers do I need? I forget shit, all right, but if it was important I'd remember it. What I need is answers from him." She jerked a thumb at Logan, then turned her glare back on him. "So yer my dad, huh? Who's my mom?"  
  
How much of this should he tell her? "Sloane, another ... operative. She had telepathic negating powers, like you."  
  
"Where is she? Still with them?"  
  
He glanced at Xavier, who simply shrugged. He was leaving it up to him. "No, she's dead." He paused briefly before adding, "They killed her." It was possible that that knowledge would shock her into wanting to help them more. It was also possible it would have the opposite effect. It was all a crapshoot.  
  
Her eyes widened in surprise, but her first response was his first response - anger. Like father, like daughter? "And where the fuck were you? You didn't stop them?!"  
  
"He had no memory of her," Xavier interjected smoothly, stepping in to save his ass. "They had tried to kill him years before, but he escaped. Yet not with his memory intact."  
  
That was a very nice way to put it. If only they were trying to kill him, it would have made it easier all the way around.   
  
"Why do they even want fucking mutants if they're always tryin' to kill 'em?!"   
  
Logan hated to admit it, but that was a damn good question. Still, he knew the answer. "'Cause the best thing to kill a mutant is another mutant. They want us as weapons for their cause."  
  
Leonie dry washed her face, which gave him a twinge in the gut - who knew nervous gestures could be hereditary as well? "So we don't play nice and they eighty six us, is that it? We're a commodity?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"You're safe here," Xavier quickly added, perhaps picking up the spike in her anxiety.  
  
But from the way she looked up at him sharply, she didn't find that comforting. "You just said they attacked this dump."  
  
"They did, but not successfully." Xavier was a born salesman; he had a glib answer for everything. "Logan fought them back."  
  
"I didn't." Not really, not successfully. He just incapacitated some of them. A lot. Most. Still, they got away with a few kids.  
  
Xavier's look was odd, somewhere between stern and proud. "They'd have overrun the school quite easily if not for you. There's no need to be modest."  
  
Leonie looked at him again, but this time with more curiosity than scorn. Logan wondered if Xavier had simply said that just for that reason, of pushing Leonie into a more favorable disposition. "So yer Mr. Tough Guy, is that it?"  
  
"It's what I was trained to do," he lied. Actually, he was trained to kill anything in any way possible, and all the adults in the room knew that. But she was freaked out enough as it was.  
  
Leonie glanced down at the carpet, her expression and demeanor becoming more sober, more introspective. "What about me?" She muttered, as if asking herself the question. "Was that what I was trained to do?"  
  
"That's what we'd like to find out," Xavier said. "Let us help you."  
  
She looked up at him helplessly, and for the first time since she'd came here, she seemed like a seventeen year old girl, not a surly proto-adult. "I-I have to think about this," she said, getting to her feet. "Can I go now?"  
  
Xavier nodded, giving her a hint of a reassuring smile. "Of course."  
  
Leonie left the office, giving Logan a single, questioning glance, as if still trying to figure out how she could be related to a hairy cretin like him. Then she was gone, and despite the closed door, Logan could hear her running down the halls. "She's gonna take after me, isn't she?" He said regretfully. "She's gonna disappear."  
  
"I don't think so," Xavier said. "If she's like you - and she certainly seems to have certain ... personality traits in common, doesn't she? - she'll want to strike back."  
  
"If we give her a target."  
  
"We may have one," he said, then admitted sheepishly, "I did a surface scan of her thoughts, and they are even less ... ordered than yours."  
  
That made Logan raise an eyebrow at him. Ordered? What was that supposed to mean? But maybe he didn't want to know. "Meanin' what? They already scrambled her frontal lobes like eggs?"  
  
Xavier's smile was wry, a dark mirth sparkling in his eyes. "You do have a way with words sometimes." But whatever humor there was died fast. "Yet, poetry aside, you're correct - someone has been inside her mind. I'd have to go deeper to be sure, but I believe they may be trying to overload her rational thought processes."  
  
Logan considered that a moment, trying to puzzle out the exact meaning. "Make her nuts?"  
  
"In a sense. Mainly just make her rely on her emotions."  
  
Now he got it. "Make her all instinct?" Is that what they tried to do to him?  
  
(Did they succeed?)  
  
"Something like that. It would certainly make her easier to control. Well, in theory."  
  
"The theory didn't work with me."  
  
"That wasn't what they were trying to do to you Logan," he said, as if he knew what the hell he was talking about. Did he? "They were trying to break you and rebuild you, strip your personality and free will, and construct something more malleable in its wake. It was bound to fail on someone as contrary as you."  
  
"I'm not contrary," he shot back. Only after he said it did he realize it was contrary.  
  
Xavier managed to swallow most of his smirk. "Not always. But you have your moments."  
  
"Look, what are we-" Logan stopped, as out of the corner of his eye he saw a hand curled into a fist, and part of an upper arm, go through the door behind him. They heard a startled, "Oops!" in the hall, as the intangible limb suddenly withdrew through the intact door. Then there was a knock.  
  
God, this place was so weird sometimes.  
  
"Yes Kitty, what is it?" Xavier said, with that studied patience that Logan knew he'd never achieve, not in a million years.  
  
She opened the door a crack and peered in, clearly chagrined. "I'm really sorry about that, Professor. I was thinking about something else and I accidentally phased -"  
  
"It's perfectly all right. Is there something I can do for you?"  
  
She bit her lower lip nervously, and said, "Actually, it's about Mr. Logan."  
  
He rubbed his forehead so she didn't catch him rolling his eyes. Had he not told them all how he hated being called "Mr. Logan"? He really thought Kitty knew better. "What is it now? Has Death finally shown up, looking for his wallet?"  
  
From the confused look on her face, she really didn't get that joke. "No, uh - there's a woman at the door, said she's a friend of yours? Considering … well, everything, I thought maybe you should check it out first."  
  
As he sighed heavily, wondering who the fuck it could be now - hey, maybe Leonie had a twin she was separated from at birth - Xavier suddenly looked suspicious. "Someone at the door? Why didn't I sense them?"  
  
It was a rhetorical question, but Kitty shrugged helplessly anyways.   
  
"Maybe it's one of Bob's friends," he told him, scowling at the thought. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility. "I'll take care of it."  
  
Xavier quirked an eyebrow at him. "I don't doubt that."  
  
Only after he left the office did Logan wonder if that was some kind of joke.   
  
As they headed down the hall, he asked Kitty, "So what does she look like?"  
  
She shrugged. "I didn't get a good look at her face. She's wearing a hood - and I don't know why, it's not raining."  
  
"A hood?" Well, maybe he was in for a fight. It would do him some good - fights were uncomplicated things; no thinking involved, unless you employed strategy. Just physical action and reaction, movement and adrenaline.   
  
"She has kind of an accent, though. Maybe British?"  
  
Srina? No, that wouldn't make sense, and besides, why would she wear a hood? She was a disappearing violet, but not a shrinking one.  
  
The door had been left ajar, but not so much that he could see who was there. Not that it mattered; he caught the scent as soon as he   
  
Was in range. "Go tell the Professor it's okay," he told her, grabbing her arm and stopping her before she could reach the door ahead of him.   
  
She gave him a deeply confused look. "You don't even know who it is."  
  
"Yes I do." He tapped the side of his nose as a reminder. "It's a friend, let him know." He swung open the door all the way, and sighed at the figure standing on the doorstep, swathed in a black leather duster, the hood of a black sweatshirt pulled over her head like a cowl. "You couldn't have called first?" He asked.  
  
Even though the dying rays of the setting sun didn't touch her directly, he could still see Yasha smirk at him. "You were hardly racing back to L.A., were you?"  
  
"Would you?"  
  
"Good point." She reached out and grabbed him, pulling him over the threshold and into a passionate kiss.  
  
He had no idea how he was going to explain this to everyone, but oh hell, who cared? At least he finally had an ally.  
  
10  
  
Bob realized Cammy was panicking - he had no idea where he was going - when he ended up in the middle of an orgy.  
  
The bodies - mostly humanoid as far as he could tell - writhed on the ground like worms in a frying pan, hiding the red grass of this realm, and covering much of the blue veined marble porticos that rung what might be called the outer ground, the last signs of "civilization" before banyon like trees as tall as the Eiffel Tower swallowed up the surrounding countryside. The sky was a clear wine color, claret as seen through a flame.  
  
He carefully stepped around frotting couples, quartets, and other equally illogical combinations, avoiding the occasional grasping hand that tried to pull him into their dog pile, and finally he entered what might be called a courtyard, marble slabs overgrown around the edges with velvety scarlet moss in a carefully cultivated style of ruin. "Bob, hon-bun, you're just in time for the party," a cheerfully languid voice called out.  
  
Off to the left of the yard was a huge circular hot tub, more for communal baths than anything else, but currently lounging in it alone was the ruler of this realm, goddess Ammit - or, as she was known to her friends, Ama. The tub was full of milk, lightly steaming, and she was sunk up to her furry breasts in it, having chosen a humanoid red panther (well, they existed somewhere) form this time, everything about her feline save for body shape and eyes, which were huge orbs of the deepest midnight blue.  
  
The Egyptians had her as a demon god because she was the "devouress of the dead", in that she supposedly judged the dead, and "ate" their souls if they didn't pass muster, thereby damning them to the endless sleep (no reincarnation). That wasn't precisely true; she wasn't a demon god, but a plain ordinary kind (if a god could be said to be plain and ordinary). But while she was on Earth - not for long - she was very much the equivalent of the Greek goddess Nemesis in that Ama basically was a divine vigilante: piss her off by doing something she didn't like, and it was goodnight nurse. (But Nemesis was really sour, and no fun at parties; also, a bit of a ragbag.) The problem was, she got medieval on the ass of Seth for having non-consensual fun with some Humans, that was pretty much the end of her tenure. As it was, she didn't much care for Earth; she could never decide if the gods or the Humans that mindlessly worshipped them were worse. She actually preferred being thought of as a demon than being worshipped, which made her one of the more sensible gods he had ever known. And it was her basically dislike for their pomposity that kept her out of Ogdoad.  
  
"Sorry hon, I can't stay. Did Cammy go through here?"  
  
She nodded, her lids heavy as if she was half asleep. "As soon as I sensed him, I told him off, and he went. But I thought Eris killed him?"  
  
"She did, but he had an escape hatch."  
  
"Really?" Her tail churned the scalding milk. In keeping with her past reputation as a selective shape shifter, her tail was not feline, but that of a crocodile. "What poor bastard ended up his avatar?"  
  
"A friend of my avatar."  
  
"Oh, ouch, I'm sorry, I woulda killed him, but I am so relaxed right now …"  
  
"It's okay, it's not your fight." Seth was a war god of sorts, with a reputation as a death god, and Ama had killed him in straight sets, although for some damn reason Osiris got the credit when he wasn't in fact on Earth (like Sy even had the balls to kill another god - he probably had his mother arrange that rumor). She was deceptively powerful, at least on the Earth plane.  
  
As of late, she had given into indolence, and he couldn't blame her really. There was nothing much to do in the Higher Realms but turn to mush, to stagnate and slowly go insane. To her credit, at least she was aiming for a pleasurable insanity.   
  
"You could join me, though - you'll catch him up with him no problem," she suggested, flicking warm milk at him with her gray scaled tail, the ears on top of her head twitching lazily. "He was bleeding energy pretty bad."  
  
"Yeah, I know, I'm picking it up." He was - it was the thread of energy he was following through all the realms.  
  
But the thread was slowly becoming a cord, widening into a stream destined to be a river - how long could he keep running until he simply exhausted his usable energy? Would he even catch up to him before he simply disencorporated violently?  
  
And where the hell did Cammy think he was running to? 


	6. Part 6

"C'mon, take a break," she encouraged, her tail churning the milk. "It's been a long time since I had any stimulating company."  
  
"None of the Og get down here?"  
  
She snorted derisively. "Yeah, right. Like they even acknowledge I exist."  
  
"I'm sorry, darlin'. I'll try and get back when I have a chance. But you got all your orgy buds out front - what about them?"  
  
She made a negative noise, sinking deeper into her milk bath while her tail twitched on its surface, making ripples and waves. "They're just Sylphs. They'll fuck anything as long as it's warm."  
  
"Can be fun, if you're in the mood for them."  
  
Ama just shrugged, acknowledging that in the slightest way possible. "They wear out their welcome fast. You really going?"  
  
"For now, yes. I'll be back, I promise." It was something of an empty promise, since he wasn't sure when that would be, but Ama was a friend, so he should really try, even if he had to explain sex was right out. Maybe by then she'd be over the idea. It wasn't anything against her, but sex with gods was usually under whelming.  
  
She nodded as if she knew he was only being kind. "Give my love to Bassie."  
  
Bastet: he knew her through Bast, in fact. "Will do. And good luck getting the Sylphs to clean up later."  
  
"Ha, those lazy bastards," she said, and gave him a loose wave, with her hand and the tip of her tail.  
  
Bob wondered how long Cammy was going to keep this up, and exactly what he thought he could trap him in.  
  
11  
  
As it turned out, the most embarrassing thing about having a vampire girlfriend was the need for someone to invite her inside the mansion.  
  
He didn't live here - not really - and somehow that made a difference. Luckily, Bobby was leaving the lounge at the time, and Logan grabbed him and asked him to invite Yasha in. He looked at him like he was completely insane, and asked why, and Logan had to promise he'd tell him later. (Somehow he thought telling him, "She's a vampire," wouldn't aid his cause at all.) Bobby did it, but he looked at them both like they were nuts.   
  
Afterwards he had to introduce them, as Bobby wasn't going away without some kind of answers, and he simply said she was Yasha, leaving out the Lady Blood (or the Mei Li part, which he was pretty sure only he knew). Bobby guessed her accent to be British too, and she corrected him, saying it was most likely a Hong Kong accent. "Hong Kong?" Bobby said, eyes growing wide. "Like where John Woo's from? Cool."  
  
What a dubious fame.  
  
He led her back to his room to escape the curious looks, and also so they could talk in privacy. As soon as he shut the door, she said, "I'm glad to see you, Logan, but just for the record, I don't think I could ever have sex in a boarding school."  
  
"Neither could I," he lied - well, there had been that time (times) with Helga, but the school was evacuated, so it seemed different. Besides, after what had happened between him and Jean - if it had been him and Jean - he felt funny about sleeping with anyone at this point. Would he be cheating Jean, or had he cheated on Yasha? He didn't know which was worse, although he did wonder why he always got in these screwed up relationships. Since he was the only connecting link, it was obviously his fault.  
  
"So who died?" She asked.  
  
He gave her a curiously look as he sat on the edge of his bed. "You know something I don't?"  
  
"Just reading the expression on your face. So what's gone on?"  
  
With a heavy sigh, he told her all about Leonie, Static, and that mess. He had to give her a brief synopsis about his history with the Organization, as he hadn't told her all that much about it either. When he was finally done, she said, "They sound like demons. Are you sure they're not?"  
  
"For the most part, no. Humans can be as cruel as demons; often crueler."  
  
"True. So have you investigated the address or the names she gave you?" He looked up at her curiously. "Internet, baby, Google. I take it from the blank stare that's a big old no."  
  
Logan rolled his eyes at himself, feeling like an idiot. "Shit. I'm not very up to date, am I?"  
  
"It's okay. Point the way to the computers, and I'll show you how it's done."  
  
He took her to the library, where most of the computers were in use, but one cleared out for him and Yasha to use. He wondered if the kids were doing something illegal, because his presence made so many of them nervous they logged off and left. Of course, he didn't recognize most of them, and maybe it was just fear of the unknown.  
  
With some help from Yasha, he was able to confirm there was a section of Toronto known as North Hill, but no Arkham Street. The closest thing to an Arkham Street was an Arkham Industries, a building complex twenty miles north of Toronto; he was unable to find any information on the business, which was suspicious.   
  
They were able to find a Paul Mason - several, in fact - in the Toronto white pages, but no Paul with a Tammy, and no Tammy Mason listed on her own. Yasha volunteered to call the Pauls on the list, and ask if they had a daughter named Leonie. He stared up at her, flabbergasted. "Why?"  
  
"Can you judge when someone's lying to you over the phone?" She replied. "I don't need to smell someone to know I'm being bullshitted. It's a gift you acquire once you get passed one hundred. Besides, don't you have to clear our getting a jet or something with someone?"  
  
"A jet?" Now he was really confused, but not for long. "Wanna go check it out?"  
  
"Check what out?" Xavier asked, coming inside the library. Although his expression remained politely neutral, in his head, Logan heard Xavier all but shout, *You invited a vampire into the school?!*  
  
He winced, then pretended to rub his eyes to cover it up. *She won't hurt anyone - she's not like that!* Out loud, he said, "Yasha, this is Professor Charles Xavier, the owner of this place. Chuck, Yasha."  
  
"Vampire," she offered. "But since you're a telepath, I'm sure you guessed."  
  
That made him arch an eyebrow. "Vampires are immune to telepathy?"  
  
She nodded, her silky black hair falling in her face before she casually tucked it behind her ear. "I'm not sure of the mechanics behind it,   
  
but yes, we are."  
  
*Not to Bob,* he thought, for Xavier's benefit. He hoped it would reassure him somewhat.  
  
"You believe you can help us?" Xavier said to her, keeping any suspicion out of his voice.  
  
She shrugged. "I am a demon, and if what Logan told me is correct, they're never quite ready for us."  
  
"So what do you propose?"  
  
"Logan and I can jet up to Toronto, see what's going on at this Arkham Industries, and maybe have a chat with any Paul Mason who seems less than honest."  
  
Logan caught a sound out in the hall, and smelled her before she poked her head in. "I want to go too."  
  
Xavier sighed, and maneuvered his wheelchair back so he could look at her too. "Leonie, I don't know if that is such a good idea."  
  
"This is about me," she insisted. "And if there's somethin' back there … I wanna know." She shifted her hard, green glare to Yasha. "Who the fuck are you?"  
  
"Yasha. You must be fucking Leonie," she deadpanned. "You got your dad's eyes."  
  
Not a good thing to say. (Did she really have his eyes?) She glowered at Yasha, eyes narrowing to slits. "No I don't."  
  
"Actually, I think it might be a good idea if she comes along," Yasha said to Xavier, never missing a beat, or taking any shit from Leonie.   
  
In fact, she'd be a good match for Leonie, since Yasha was so cool Leonie would frustrate herself trying to find some way to get to her. When she wanted to be, Yasha could be emotionally beyond anyone's reach. It was an odd thing to find endearing, and yet he did; he sometimes he wished he could master that, be perfectly above the manipulations of others. "Sometimes familiar sights, sounds, and smells jar the memory. I know it's worked for the Toshiro Mifune here."  
  
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Leonie exclaimed, confused and ticked off about it.  
  
It even confused Logan for a moment, except then he remembered that was the name of a Japanese actor who was in a lot of Akira Kurosawa films, usually playing … a samurai. Oh, how funny, in a really annoying way.  
  
Even Xavier looked briefly confused - not just by the Mifune reference either - but then he watched Xavier's blue eyes glance at Yasha's hand (currently resting on his shoulder), and something seemed to resolve there. Xavier knew then that Yasha's offer to help was not a trick or a ruse; she wasn't helping Leonie, or them. She was helping him alone. Logan still wished he knew exactly why. But that seemed to be good enough for Xavier, who accepted that with an almost imperceptible nod. "It could be dangerous, though."  
  
Leonie scoffed, like Xavier must have known she would do (Logan knew it was coming). "So fucking what? I can handle it."  
  
Xavier's gaze settled on Logan, skidding off Leonie as if she was made of ice, but it was clear why - her reaction was a given. "It could very well be a trap. You could get in over your head."  
  
"We can handle it," he assured him, aware of the dangers, and aware that he meant him and Yasha, not Leonie. She was skilled - obviously - but undisciplined, and an unknown quantity in a fight. She was a kid, and he had no idea if he could ever trust her.   
  
"No kidding," Leonie interjected disparagingly. "But what is it she can do?"  
  
Yasha gave Leonie such a withering glare she actually seemed to rear back slightly: no being could give a death stare like a vampire. "I can kill things. What about you?"  
  
Leonie couldn't answer that; she didn't dare.   
  
Xavier looked uncomfortable, and Logan heard in his mind, *Can you handle her if things start to get out of control?*  
  
He didn't mean Leonie. It was hard not to shoot him an irritated look as he thought, *I don't need to. Yasha can handle herself; she's not an animal.*  
  
*No, she's a demon.*  
  
*So's Brendan - are you sending him away?* A complete cheap shot, and unfair to Brendan (who was only half demon anyways), but Xavier glanced away, almost chagrined.  
  
So it was down to this - hunting down some kind of child engineering Organization offshoot with an unstable teenager and a vampire.  
  
Well, he'd done worse things.  
  
***  
  
As it turned out, things got worse, even before they left.  
  
The attempts to call Paul Mason turned out to be a bust: two went straight to answering machine, another had his phone line disconnected, another had moved and had his number co-opted by a doughnut shop, and the last was actually picked up by an elderly, widowed man who did have kids, but none were Leonie. Yasha felt he was telling the truth, and that the Paul Mason name Leonie gave them was a pseudonym, and Logan was inclined to agree with her.  
  
When Logan put his "X Men" jacket back on, still feeling silly about the whole thing, he thought the worst (explaining the jacket to Yasha) was over. But no, of course not.  
  
They just reached the underground hangar when Leonie came storming up to him, already in full snit mode. "What the fuck are they doing here?" She demanded.  
  
And that's when Logan saw they had a full house.  
  
Piotr was standing beside the jet, his hands in the pockets of his own X jacket. "The Professor thought you might need a co-pilot," he said cheerily, unmoved by Leonie's snit. Maybe he figured "Your daughter, you deal with her".  
  
Off to the right, and closer to the door, was the group of miscreants known as Bobby, Brendan, and ringleader Rogue (all in similar jackets), and Rogue - as group spokesman - was instantly defensive. "You could use some help, and we can do that."  
  
He shook his head. "You're not coming along, forget it."  
  
"Yes we are," Rogue insisted, following him as he walked towards the jet gangway. "We look harmless. That gives us the element of surprise if nothing else."  
  
"I said no. It could be dangerous."  
  
"And it could be nothing."  
  
"And you could always use someone to guard the plane while you're gone," Bobby interjected. "We could do that."  
  
Rogue gave him a very dirty look for that, as obviously she didn't want to be stuck guarding the plane again, but Logan still didn't like the idea. "Look, kids, this isn't-"  
  
"We're not kids," Rogue protested, aware she was lying. "We can handle ourselves."  
  
"Logan," Yasha interjected, in perfect Cantonese. "Let them come."  
  
He looked at her sharply, and instantly jumped to Cantonese. "That's insane. At best, they will get in the way."  
  
"There's never such a thing as too many people in a raiding party, hon. Besides, they have powers, yes? They could be useful."  
  
There were confused looks bouncing around from everyone, as they were the only ones who could speak Cantonese (no shock there). Only Piotr looked like he really didn't care. "If you're gonna talk about us behind our backs, could you at least speak English?" Rogue asked.  
  
"They're hardly field tested; they're a liability." Technically, so was Piotr - had he ever gone out in the field? Well, at least he could turn steel; that pretty much protected him from the worst of the shit. (Unless they had adamantium bullets, then he was so fucked.)  
  
"But isn't it better to find that out now, while we're around to save their asses? Next time they may not be that lucky. Besides, we can assign them to keep an eye on your daughter, and that will free us up, because you know that girl's going to be trouble."  
  
He stared into her black eyes, frowning, resenting her and admiring her at the same time. "You were once a Marine, weren't you?"  
  
At least that made her laugh. "No, I'm just a controlling bitch. Being a vampire just makes it worse."  
  
"Can I blame you if things go wrong?"  
  
"You're welcome to try."  
  
He couldn't help but smirk, bothered anew that he could have so much in common with a vampire. But she wasn't an ordinary one, as he told Xavier, so perhaps he could take some comfort in that.  
  
In spite of what she said, he felt strange about it - he knew damn well he'd regret it. But it would be nice if Leonie had someone else to bother for a while. With a heavy sigh, he turned towards Rogue, Bobby, and Brendan, and said (in English), "Fine. But you can only come along if you do what I say when I say it - no lip, okay?"  
  
There were nods, although Rogue chose a semi-sarcastic salute. "Okay, chief."  
  
"You can't be serious," Leonie complained, confirming it was a good idea.  
  
"I didn't know you spoke … Chinese?" Piotr commented, obviously guessing the language.  
  
"Logan speaks a lot of languages," Rogue said. How'd she know that?  
  
Piotr nodded, accepting it without question. "Cool." Then he asked, in Russian, "Russian too?"  
  
Logan nodded, and replied in the same language. "Of course."  
  
"Damn," he said, reverting to English and smiling. "I guess I can't curse without you know what I'm saying, huh?"  
  
He shrugged. "I won't tell. I curse all the time."  
  
"Loudly," Bobby helpfully added. "In English."  
  
Logan pointed up the ramp. "Get moving before I change my mind."  
  
Piotr went up first, and Rogue, Bobby, and Brendan quickly followed, Bren giving Yasha a strange glance. Did he know she was demon? Oh, probably. He wondered how he'd handle the actual news of what she was.  
  
Leonie got up in his face again, and snapped, "They can't come along. They're kids - they don't know shit!"  
  
Logan raised an eyebrow at her, ready to tell her she was a kid too, but Yasha told her coolly, "Then you'll just have to make sure they don't fuck up, now don't you?"  
  
If they got through this intact, Logan decided he just might marry her.  
  
12  
  
Although she felt sorry for Logan, having to deal with Leonie, Yasha wondered if she wasn't getting a raw deal here too.  
  
Piotr and Logan were flying the jet, but Leonie had decided she should keep an "eye" on them, so was annoying them (no, Logan - the Russian had decided to combat her with an almost aggressive cheerfulness), and she had retreated into the "back" with the rest of the kids, sealing the hatch so they didn't catch Leonie's eye. It wasn't that she was horrible, it was just that she was so sour and combative she was about as nice to be around as a rabid, radioactive weasel with the mange. But even so, Yasha did understand where she was coming from; she just found out that not only did she have a dad, but she was just an alternate sexed clone of his with an extra feature. Not only was that a blow to your identity, it was a blow to yourself self-esteem.  
  
Leonie had yet to endear herself to anyone either. The specter of "nicknames" came up, and once everyone fessed up to theirs (Rogue cheerfully pointing out Logan's was Wolverine), Leonie snickered at them all and declared that the stupidest thing she'd ever heard.  
  
That's when they sealed the door, to keep her out.  
  
"Mine's Lady Blood," she offered, if only to make them feel better.  
  
Rogue tried to put on her best smile. "Really? That sounds kinda cool."  
  
Bobby shifted uncomfortably, and asked, "Why? I mean, your power doesn't have something to do with blood, does it? I mean … I'm not squeamish or anything-"  
  
Rogue gave him a small shrug. "Oh, you so are, liar."  
  
He gave her a small shove back, both grinning, the hormone level in the section rising a bit. Brendan, the boy who smelled vaguely like a Brachen demon, was sitting on the same bench as they were (she didn't find it at all surprising she had a seat by herself) was sitting on the other end from the couple, who were sitting side by side (they were both wearing jackets, so the only exposed skin on Rogue was her neck and face). It was an interesting bit of body language psychology.   
  
She met the boy's ruby red eyes, and said, "Go on and ask. I know you're dying to."  
  
He lifted his chin slightly, as if gearing up to jump into a fight, and said, "You're a demon, aren't you?"  
  
She nodded, and Bobby and Rogue stopped their giggling and playful shoving. "Indeed I am." She kept the knowledge that he was half Brachen to herself for now. Certainly it explained why he winced when Rogue gave his nickname as Demon.  
  
He crossed his arms over his chest, looking even more defensive. "Yeah. What are you?"  
  
She sat back against the bulkhead, feeling the thrum of the engines vibrate through her back (it was actually kind of pleasant), and said simply, "I'm a vampire."  
  
The smell of fear was suddenly so thick, she felt like coughing.  
  
Rogue stared at her, wide eyed and clearly unsure if she was joking or not. "A vampire? Ya mean, something that sucks people's blood?"  
  
She nodded. "But don't worry-I ate before I left." Well, she had a big pint of blood at the Way Station; she didn't know where you got decent blood in New York, unless you went to Central Park after dark and waited for some guy to try and rape you. And even then, the blood was sub-par.  
  
"And Logan knows this?" she asked in disbelief. Bobby had actually slid a bit away from her, even though Yasha was not sitting directly across from him.   
  
"The Bionic Nose? Yes, of course he does. But I'm not like most vamps, so don't worry, I'm not going to bite any of you."  
  
"All vampires are evil," Brendan sniped, but he was just sounding defensive. She was picking up a vibe of self-loathing, like he hated being a demon. She supposed he couldn't blame him, although, if you had to be a demon, Brachen was probably the best of the lot. He certainly had pretty eyes.  
  
"Most are, I grant you. But some of us end up changed by circumstances."  
  
"What kind of circumstances?" Rogue asked suspiciously.  
  
"I was cursed by Buddhists."  
  
For an entire minute they just stared at her. Finally, Brendan asked, "Buddhists curse people?"  
  
"They do if they have an ironic sense of humor. It wasn't like they could kill me; demon or not, it goes against the basic tenets of their beliefs."  
  
"But you're still a vampire?" Rogue was clearly trying to figure this all out. "You still drink blood and get burned by the sun and stuff?"  
  
"The curse wasn't meant to help me; it was meant to make me unhappy with my existence."  
  
"That's it?" Bobby asked.  
  
"It seems very … existential," Brendan agreed.  
  
She shrugged. "They were Zen Buddhists."  
  
They all ruminated on this, and there was much glancing at each other, scratching heads and shrugging shoulders. Finally they accepted it, because really they had no choice. To cut off any further stupid questions (along the lines of "Can you turn into a bat?"), she looked at Brendan, and asked, "So, how's the Brachen thing working out for you?"  
  
He shrunk deeper into his leather jacket, looking slightly miserable. "You know, huh?"  
  
"Demons can usually pick up on one another."  
  
"Like "gaydar"?" He replied, with bitter humor. "Do you know anything about Brachens at all? Like why we're spiky when the spikes don't do anything?"  
  
She didn't want to tell him she always wondered about that herself, so she lied. "It's just an adaptation of some sort." Then she decided to be encouraging, if only so he wouldn't sulk the entire flight; they had Leonie for that. "Brachens are pretty cool, you know. You're like the hippies of the demon world. In a good way, I mean."  
  
Rogue cocked her head curiously, looking between her and Brendan. "Yeah? How so?"  
  
"They're very peace loving. They don't like to hurt things, or get into that whole megalomania or domination thing that most demons fall into. And they're pretty tough to kill, which is always a bonus."  
  
"Hard to kill?" Brendan repeatedly dubiously. "Like Logan hard? Er, to kill." He blushed faintly, looking away, and Yasha couldn't help but smile. She thought he had a crush on him; that confirmed it. Not that she blamed him at all.  
  
"Not quite to that level, but close. In your spiky form, your muscular walls are generally tough enough to protect your bones and internal organs from damage." Also, it was impossible to kill a Brachen by breaking its neck, but she wasn't going to mention that, as that was too much information, and she couldn't see him finding that reassuring.  
  
"Oh," he finally said, a little confused as to how he should react to that information. "Well, that's … good, I guess."  
  
"What he really wants to ask is if Logan looks as good naked as he does shirtless," Rogue said, grinning, teasing Brendan.  
  
"I do not!" he lied, giving her a scorching look. If Brachen looks could have killed, the ceiling would have blown off.  
  
Yasha smirked, and said, "Oh, you'd better believe it. He's like Michelangelo's "David", with hair and not … small."  
  
Bobby buried his face in his hands, mortified, while Rogue laughed, and Brendan just goggled at her, clearly imagining that. "Um … huh," he finally said, flushing slightly.  
  
"I so didn't need to know that," Bobby groaned in horror.  
  
If Logan found out what she'd told him, he'd be so pissed, but what could he do really? Besides, they had bigger problems than these three knowing he was packing a Howitizer as opposed to a snub nose.  
  
Maybe it was just restlessness at being stuck with a bunch of kids - she really didn't like kids, although this group didn't seem so bad - but she was dying for a cigarette, and she hadn't smoked in … well, couple decades, at least. She didn't really keep track. And she didn't even like cigarettes; she just took it up to give her something to do with her hands.  
  
After the embarrassment and awe had died down (and Leonie could be clearly heard complaining through the walls), Bobby asked, perhaps to distract himself, "Are you, like, really dead? Vampires are supposed to be dead, right?"  
  
"Yes, and yes, I am. You have to die to become a vampire." She then added wryly, "I assume that's not a problem?"  
  
Poor kid. He looked really discombobulated.  
  
Rogue scrutinized her, her look more clinical than unfriendly, and said what all of them must have been thinking. "Have you killed people?"  
  
"I'm a vampire. That kind of goes without saying."  
  
That should have been the end of that, but to the girl's credit, she pressed on. "How many?"  
  
"Too many. I never kept count, and no, don't even ask for an estimate. There are some things you really shouldn't know."  
  
Rogue sat back, looking slightly peeved at her non-answer, but quickly decided on another tack. "How'd you meet Logan? And why are you helping him?" She was trying to protect not only them, but Logan as well. How sweet.  
  
"I met him in Japan. And I'm helping him because he helped me, and frankly, I find him fascinating. I haven't found anyone fascinating for the longest time. Come to think of it, ever." And that was true. Logan was so curiously very much like her - he was haunted by his past, and extremely good at killing, whether he liked it or not. The only difference really (besides all the obvious) was that he couldn't remember most of his past, which seemed to make the haunting even worse. They were both outcasts among the outcasts, pariahs among the rejected; a special kind of misfit. She supposed they all had to stick together.  
  
"How old are you?" Brendan wondered.  
  
She smirked at that. "Never ask a woman her age, Bren. But let's just say "extremely" and leave it at that."  
  
Yasha idly wondered if they would find any of those Organization fucks who sliced open Logan. She really hoped they did.  
  
She couldn't wait to do the very same thing to them. But she was pretty sure they'd never heal. 


	7. Part 7

13  
  
  
  
As soon as he set foot in the dimension, Bob knew he should have guessed it would end here.  
  
The air was so cold it was almost solid, and while the "ground" beneath his feet looked like snow, there was no crunching as he stepped upon it; it was as hard as steel, frozen beyond permafrost.   
  
And it was all white. A flat white expanse stretching towards slightly darker white mountains that looked like titanic mounds of mashed potatoes, reaching up to a sky as white as a glaucoma. Surely he could have seen his breath if there was actually any breathing going on.  
  
But Cammy was panting, in a way. He was sitting on the ice sheet that made up this very white hell, the home of Ymir, and as he saw Bob, he didn't even try to stand, just kept clutching his side like he was holding his guts in. "You know you're never getting out of here," Cammy said, stating the obvious. "Ymir hates you."  
  
"Oh, I don't know. I can wear out my welcome pretty fast; he'll probably be eager to chuck me out in no time." He just stood where he was, hands on hips, aware that this was really the end of the line. Cammy wasn't going anywhere after this. "So what happened? Who'd you piss off besides me?"  
  
"It was always you, you bastard," he said, panting in the frozen air, his "breath" never showing. "And you know it."  
  
Bob wondered if he was already delirious, but no, dying gods rarely lost it until the absolute end. "Me? What? I just stabbed you once."  
  
"You know damn well what I mean," he snarled. He was surrounded by an areola of shifting light, his own personal aurora borealis, all his energy bleeding out into spectrums that could only exist here. "You booby trapped your avatar."  
  
He looked at him expectantly, waiting for more. "To protect him from you, yes …"  
  
"To do more than that."  
  
"No. What the fuck are you on about? Are you implying that Logan hurt you in some way?"  
  
Cammy's eyes roiled with blood. "You know that he did."  
  
Bob scratched his head, trying to figure out what he was getting at. "How could he hurt you? Everything I did I did to protect him, nothing more. He was a Human - how could he fucking hurt you?"  
  
Cammy snickered, clearly thinking he was full of shit. "You knew I'd try and take him. How'd you do it? I didn't even pick it up until it was too late. I mean, I knew your energy was there, but-"  
  
"Wait, hold the phone," he said, trying to figure out what he was going on about. Logan hurt him? But when he found them, Logan was paralyzed; he couldn't move, never the less hurt a war god. "What are you talking about? When was this damage done?"  
  
He regarded him with suspicion, his visible aura cycling through the rainbow. Would have been pretty if it wasn't a sign of eminent death. "I tried to take him too, you know; I knew my avatar would need servants."  
  
"So … what? You tried to brainwash him?"  
  
"I tried to overwhelm him, use the power he still had from you against him, but … it started feeding back somehow … stronger than before. Ever been caught in a feedback loop of your own power, Bob? It's a real bitch. I thought I got a little burned but I was okay. But I wasn't okay." He snorted a bitter laugh at the thought. "Killed by my own fucking power. Can you imagine such a thing? How the fuck did you arrange for that, you slimy son-of-a-bitch?"  
  
"I don't have the slightest fucking idea what you're talking about." Or did he? As Bob stood there, trying to piece together why Cammy would be lying to him at a time like this, he realized he wasn't. Logan had helped kill him, but not in the way that Cammy assumed.  
  
He suddenly flashed back on the day Logan showed up at the Way Station so full of aimless rage it was nearly bursting out of his skin, spewing out like arterial blood. Jean had revealed herself to be alive, and flooded Logan with a cacophony of memories and images - which was mostly Cammy's energy just riding the wavelength, trying to flip switches in his head and make him turn against him; it almost succeeded by the sheer fact that he hadn't bothered to tell him Jean was still alive.  
  
Wasn't there less of a sense of his energy in Logan's mind? He thought perhaps it was just all the Cammy/Jean energy drowning it - there was certainly some - but …  
  
Son of a bitch.  
  
Bob couldn't help but laugh, because it was ironic, and oh so right. Sometimes, karma did manage to win a victory or two.  
  
"What's so fucking funny?" Cammy spat, his rage an almost palpable force.  
  
"I didn't do it, Cam. How the fuck could I have? If I left that energy in Logan's mind, you would have picked up on it immediately." (In his mind's eye, he could still see Logan raging at him: "Something did, goddamn it, and you know it! It was one of your fucking god friends, Bob! Do you really think I don't know the taste of that power?!" And there was the key, the thing that sealed Camaxtli's face - "The taste of that power". In retrospect, how did Logan get a taste of it? How did he have any idea of what Cammy was trying to do to him?)  
  
Good girl. Clever girl too.  
  
Cammy's bloody eyes reflected confusion as he realized he wasn't lying. "Yes, but … it had to be you, because who the fucking else could it be?"  
  
Bob shook his head, and couldn't help but grin. Gods, he was going to enjoy this. "Let me break it down for you. You convinced Jean she had killed you, and started subtly pulling her strings. You insinuated yourself into her as … what? Her own dark side? Surely she was loving the power - who wouldn't? - and you started moving her to do things you wanted. All well and good. But then you started suggesting to her that she hurt Logan, and made her believe she really wanted to do it. Maybe she even believes that for a little while. But when it's go time, she has a change of heart.  
  
"You forgot she was a telepath, Cam, and she had been in Logan's head a few times. Enough times to pick up on the fact that some of my energy was almost always there, and a little thing I told Logan, about being able to use something in him to enhance my own powers. While she was sticking to the main game plan, she deviated; she collected some of my power using her power - actually, yours - and rerouted it through Logan's mind. Did you also forget she was a telekinetic, and growing accustomed to handling power with her mind? She created the feedback loop, perhaps to stop her from hurting him, or perhaps to "burn out" that part of her that wanted to hurt him. You made a stupid error, Cam. You were so arrogant, you thought you could control her easily, and that the puny Human had nothing she could use against you.  
  
"But Logan was right - you drongo, you picked a humanitarian. And then you tried to make that humanitarian hurt a man she cared about before you had completely subverted her will." He chuckled again, shaking his head. "She fucked you, mate.  
  
"I didn't kill you. Jean did."  
  
14  
  
  
  
It was funny how no one ever warned you how difficult it was to find parking for a jet. Well, at least it was night; darkness gave you some leeway.  
  
They eventually put it down in an abandoned lot with a few scrub trees that would hopefully screen them from view of the Arkham Industrial complex, just three fifths of a mile down the road. It was far enough out in a rural enclave (just abutting a more suburban outskirt of Toronto) that there was no one around to witness it, although that also meant they'd stick out if anyone did come along. There was just no way to win sometimes.  
  
Yasha offered to go on ahead, and scout the terrain. "If there's anything with a pulse in the area, I'll know."  
  
He nodded and let her go, and she did that vampire thing, melting into the dark like it was a physical object she could part and reseal, a scrim of night.  
  
"How did she do that?" Piotr asked quietly.  
  
"What did she mean if there's anything with a pulse in the area?" Leonie inquired.  
  
The other kids just looked slightly uncomfortable, so he figured she'd told them what she was. "It's a figure of speech," he said, not wanting to know if what Angel once told him - about a vampire being able to smell blood from a mile away - was actually true.  
  
  
  
He didn't like them all being one conspicuous group (apparently no one besides Yasha knew anything about stealth), but he wasn't going to split them up until he had some idea of what they were facing. He was already regretting bringing the kids, and nothing had happened yet.  
  
They stayed off the road, for all the good that would do, as there was nothing along the way save for weedy lots, and something that looked like it was being developed when the workers just gave up on it.   
  
They were in sight of the complex - a big, sprawling collection of cinder block buildings and tin walled warehouses that made it look not a little like an abandoned pulp mill, surrounded by a thirty foot high chain link fence, topped with barb wire. There were no lights on, no obvious guards; it looked abandoned, which made him instantly suspicious. "Anything seem familiar?" he asked Leonie.  
  
She was looking around, her face contracted into an expression of deep thought. "I'm … I'm not entirely certain."  
  
He smelled Yasha long before she melted out of the dark, joining them once more, but the other's weren't quite as prepared. Rogue actually clapped a hand over her own mouth to suppress a surprised yelp.  
  
"It appears derelict," she reported. "But the fence is highly electrified, and I believe part of its locking mechanism is adamantium. Also, I smell infrared trip beams, and I'm sure there are Humans somewhere inside, just keeping a low profile."  
  
"How do you do that?" Piotr asked, astounded by her abrupt re-appearance. "Is that your power?"  
  
"Smell infrared beams?" Bobby repeated. "They have a scent?"  
  
Logan nodded. "Concentrated ozone scent, with a tinge of incinerated dust."  
  
"Is there anything you can't smell?" Bobby wondered.  
  
"Not really."  
  
"Oh, that's another thing," Yasha added. "There's a reek of paint thinner that gets overwhelming the closer you get. I think they're deliberately trying to cover their smell."  
  
Okay, that was very suspicious. Added to all the rest, it equal troubled on a major scale. "Okay. We have to assume we're expected."  
  
"Not we," Rogue corrected. "You. We don't have super smelling abilities."  
  
True enough. "How much voltage in the fence? Can you guess?" He asked.  
  
Yasha gave him a strange look out of the corner of her eye. "It sounds like it's cycling near lethal, which means it will probably just sting you. But I can take care of it from inside, as long as you guys can be patient."  
  
"Inside? How do you expect to get past the fence and avoid the beams?" Only in retrospect did Logan realize it was a stupid question.  
  
She smiled at him, dark eyes twinkling like gems, and said, "Hang back and watch how it's done, Human." She then ran off silently, headed towards the fence.  
  
"Why does she keep specifically mentioning Humans?" Piotr asked. "Aren't we all Human?"  
  
Brendan coughed, but no one said anything.  
  
As it was, Yasha provided a perfect distraction. About a meter and a half away from the fence, she jumped - straight up, in that vampiric, gravity defying way of hers, and easily cleared the top of the fence (well, it wasn't as tall as a building, was it) and landed on her feet on the inside of the complex, her impact kicking up a little dust and illuminating the ruby red beams of the infrared security traps.  
  
"Holy shit," Piotr gasped. "Exactly how powerful is she?"  
  
"Inhumanly so," he said, inwardly groaning at the pun. But it was true.  
  
Yasha had immediately disappeared from view, and as they got closer, Logan could hear the hum of electricity thrumming through the fence, smell the charge in the dry, cold air, feel it make the hair on his arms stand on end.   
  
"What is she gonna do?" Bobby asked quietly.  
  
"Probably shut the power off at the source," Logan guessed. It was a good bet, and Yasha was no slouch in the tactical arena; she'd probably shut power off to the entire complex, if that was possible.   
  
"How will she find the source?" Leonie wondered skeptically.  
  
"Her kind are born hunters," Brendan offered, speaking for the first time since they left the jet. "She can find anything."  
  
"Her kind?" Piotr repeated, confused and on the verge of being offended. "What is that supposed to mean?"  
  
But once again, Yasha came to the rescue. The electric hum died, and even though it was just a background noise to the others, they obviously noticed the sudden lack of sound. "Did she do that?" Rogue asked.  
  
"Well, I certainly hope so," he said, and as he approached the fence, he popped the claws on one hand. Rather than fuck with the gate, he simply slashed through the fence, large enough to accommodate them all. As he stepped through the new hole, Yasha walked out of the darkness to meet him, her coat belling behind her like a cape. "I found an outside box and ripped out all the wires, but if they're an evil organization worth their salt, they'll have an emergency back up only accessible from the inside. We'll probably have only a couple minutes before they get everything powered up again."  
  
He nodded. "Most likely Human placement?"  
  
"Straight on ahead, and slightly off to the right."  
  
He held out his hand to stop the group, and said quietly, "This is a big place, so let's branch out. Yasha, take Piotr, Leonie, Rogue, and Bobby on the left side of the complex; Bren, you're with me." Well, having a demon along - even if only half - was always useful, and he figured everyone else could look after Leonie.  
  
"Hold it," Leonie and Yasha both said at the same time. They uncomfortably glanced at each other, but Yasha recovered first. "That's way too uneven a split. I know you're among the world's best ass kickers, but it's still too risky for you."  
  
"And I'm not going with them," Leonie protested.  
  
He rolled his eyes. "What happened to no lip?" But they had no time to argue; as soon as the electricity kicked back in, they would know the perimeter had been breached. Okay, so if he took Leonie (argh), Brendan alone might not be able to ride herd on her, and besides, they were all "physical" power mutants (save for Leonie's static powers, which were limited to scrambling telepaths and electronic equipment). They probably needed someone with a projection power (which was Bobby in this group), or Yasha, who, while not having a projection power of any sort, was as good as anyone who had one. She could leap tall buildings in a single bound, and could probably do that Matrix "run along the wall" thing without any CGI guys to help. Even Human laws of physics didn't count for demons, which was probably why so many of them were so fucking dangerous. (Did her throwing knives count as a projection ability?) But he couldn't have him and Yasha on the same team; as far as he was concerned, they were the best, most experienced fighters here, and it was unconscionable to keep them on the same unit. It was also bad tactics. "Fine, Leonie, Bobby, you're with me. Yasha, keep them intact."  
  
She gave him a slightly sour look, but nodded, accepting the logic of it.  
  
Rogue, for her part, looked a little hurt, possibly because he didn't pick her for his team (well, it wasn't personal - she was a physical power too, until she "took" someone else's), while Bobby looked slightly startled that he had been chosen. "Uh … okay."  
  
"Whoever finds nothing joins the other team. If there's trouble, send a signal."  
  
"What kind of signal?" Piotr wondered, looking around as if to check for flares.  
  
Logan shrugged, wondering why he had to work with such an inexperienced team. "Blow something up; throw someone through a wall. Just get our attention."  
  
Piotr stared at him blankly. "You're joking, right?"  
  
"Same for you, tough guy," Yasha said, still scowling at being stuck with two newbies, only one of whom knew she was actually a vampire.  
  
He motioned to Brendan and Bobby to follow him - Leonie was already breathing down his neck - and told Piotr, without looking back, "Armor up. Don't get caught short."  
  
Logan heard him mutter to Yasha, "Do we even know there's anyone here?"  
  
But of course there was someone here. The Organization loved these kind of "duck blinds", things that looked like something else, these creepy, abandoned places with strangely sophisticated security. It was all part of the plan, part of the routine, trying hard to be sheep, to be harmless - to be anything but what they were.  
  
As they walked towards the main building, which looked strangely like a converted barn, he tensed, and tried to narrow all his senses, all his thoughts, on what might be waiting for them up ahead.  
  
Because in a world as fucked up as this one, it could be anything.  
  
15  
  
The look on Cammy's face was priceless. "No," he finally said, anger making his aura predominately purple. "You're a fucking liar, Bob! You're just making shit up to humiliate me! It ain't fuckin' gonna work, you outcast piece of shit - "  
  
"The problem, as I see it, is the same problem that led to you leaving Earth before one of the big cheeses forced you off, Cam - you're a stuck up motherfucker. You were always better than everyone else, mortal and otherwise, and since you were, you could never be bested. That kind of thinking makes you lazy, Cam; it makes you sloppy. Did you immediately forget that Eris not only bested you, she destroyed your realm? You could be beaten, and badly - did that not sink in? Or did you think your only peril was only from other gods?"  
  
Cammy's bloody eyes were starting to melt down his face, a thick crimson trail that left bloody holes in his head. "Coming from you, that's really rich. You picked your avatar for a reason, Bob - he's a damn sight more dangerous than you could ever hope to be. Are you jealous? Do you covet his ability to just cut the fucking bullshit?"  
  
"Why'd you take him then? If you hadn't the strength to switch avatars or brainwash him?"  
  
"To kill him, asshole. Itchy was gonna distract you and build me up while I took out your fucking avatar."  
  
Which is where Logan's decision to try and "tempt" Cammy into picking him over Jean had actually saved his life; Cammy could not pass up the taste of good old torment and fear - what god could? So Logan actually bought time with his own emotional agony; smart boy. But then again, he probably knew sadists like the back of his hand. "Then, if you ever got strong enough, come for me?"  
  
He scoffed, his eyes dripping down his face, pooling on the permafrost. "Why? The fun was gonna be watching you suffer as I killed your whole fucking family next."  
  
"Big words from the melting Wicked Witch of the West."  
  
"You don't actually think it's over, do you? You don't think you've won? You've lost, better than I could have ever planned for." His aura was bleeding golden now, a sure sign of the end. The light at the end of the tunnel was often just the murder of someone else's god. "I transmogrified her to survive in the other realms, Bob; I'm in her cells, her DNA, and my power can't be removed. And without me to regulate it, it's all hers." He chuckled acidly. "You know what happens when a Human gets god like powers, Bob. They're on a lower plane for a reason, and you should know, 'cause didn't you have to wipe out one once? Wasn't he a relative of yours?"  
  
"Shut up," he demanded. Whether Cammy was dying or not, he was not going to have him dredge up things better off forgotten.  
  
But of course he didn't. Why would Cam start being reasonable now? "Stupid, shitty Humans - they worship us because we live on a higher plane, and they never understand that we are the epitome of creation, all right: we are pure corruption, insanity distilled to its highest form. They are petty and weak, because they can never aspire to our depths of depravity, although some of 'em give it a good try, don't they? We have to be corrupt; we keep the inherently corrupt universes running, and they are by nature damaged, flawed entities, and yet never corrupt enough to keep up with us. They look into the abyss, and they fall; it fills them, and it rules them. As soon as they realize there's no grand design, just an old war between Highers that don't even give a fuck about them, they never can handle it, can they?" He snickered, a sound that grew into a mocking, smug laugh that seemed to echo throughout this frigid, sparkling hell. "And in the end, the humanitarian is worse, isn't it? It's the ones who think they're doing what's best that damn them all."  
  
Cammy's meltdown came to its abrupt end then. He seemed to explode into a million photonic fragments of prismatic light, a beautiful cascade of shifting light, quickly absorbed into the ground as if sucked down by a vacuum.  
  
For a damn good reason - what were the realms but physical embodiments of the gods that created them? Which meant that what little there had been left of Cammy had just been absorbed into -  
  
The ground shook, hard, as if a giant had just stomped his foot. A very good possibility. "Bob," a deep voice like the peal of thunder roared. "What are you doing here, you disgusting worm?"  
  
He rubbed his eyes, and pasted on his best smile as he turned to face the god of frost, Ymir. 'Ymmy, hey, didn't realize this was your place," he lied, as he found himself staring at two thick white pillars. Actually, they were legs, but he was afraid to look up, for fear that Ymir hadn't bothered with the formality of clothing. There were just some things you were better off not seeing. "What say I just nip off, huh?"  
  
But he knew there was no way in hell Ymir was going to let him off that easy.  
  
Man, it was always just one thing after another.  
  
***  
  
Getting in was no problem, which was just something else that was wrong with this picture.  
  
The place looked like it had been cleaned out in a hurry too, and Human scents lingered, even though the reek of paint thinner was strong enough to wipe out a lot of subtle nuances. It was making his eyes water.  
  
Leonie sneezed, and wiped her forearm across her nose. "Why the fuck would they stink up the place so much?"  
  
"You don't remember any of these scents, do ya?"  
  
"No. I can hardly smell anything."  
  
"That's why," Logan said, blinking back tears. God, why paint thinner? Why not compost or something with less acetate? Really sliced through the sinuses like razors. But that was the point, wasn't it? It also meant they expected Leonie to work her way back here.  
  
Not just Leonie?  
  
They were walking down a corridor just like any other corridor in this drafty, cold, reeking place, their footsteps echoing against the metal, when Brendan asked, "So none of this is familiar to you?"  
  
Obviously aimed at Leonie. "What do you think?" She snapped, a little more harshly than she should have. "It's just an empty tin can that stinks of chemicals. It could be anywhere! It means nothing to me."  
  
But Logan could grasp scents beyond the paint thinner, and he was starting to smell a spike in her fear, her heart pounding triple time in anxiety. If she didn't remember anything specifically, there was still something in this place triggering a fight or flight response in her.   
  
Something in her was remembering at the very least a place like this - and the memories were far from pleasant. He knew the feeling.  
  
That's when he noticed a new smell, so fain the almost missed it. What the hell was it? There was a noise too, just at the threshold of his hearing …  
  
"Hey, is it warmer in here?" Bobby wondered.  
  
Logan stopped, glanced at the stark metal walls and floor of this hall, and saw absolutely nothing. But he still smelled … ozone?  
  
Metal walls.  
  
"Out, now," he roared, spinning on the kids and shoving them backwards, into the adjoining corridor.  
  
But that's when Logan heard the surge, before he even tasted the electricity in his mouth, and he knew damn well it was too late. 


	8. Part 8

16  
  
Considering they had been warned they were waiting for anything between a lone mutant girl and an entire squadron of freaks. The end result was a big disappointment.  
  
They had only three down in this hall: an adult male, an adult female, and a girl. Although the musculature was more or less correct for target one - Wolverine - the hair was wrong. He could have cut it and dyed it black, but based on his psych profile he was unlikely to have done such a thing ("Will not conceal or alter his identity due to a perverse stubborn streak."), and besides, he'd seen the guy was metal or something before the dischargers came to full power. He bet he conducted electricity like a lightning rod; that had to hurt. Was he even still alive?  
  
Not that it mattered. They were only supposed to take target one and two - the girl - and get clear; the rest were to be left behind. Home Front had no material interest in unknown muties.  
  
Jones walked past the Asian woman and the big guy (who was or wasn't dead) and came to stop at the girl, peering down at her curiously. Was this the one? She didn't look it - didn't she have red hair? - but she could have been wearing a wig. Besides, he was horrible with faces; he could never remember if he knew a person or not, even within his own family.  
  
"Garcia," he asked, pointing his tranq gun down at the unconscious girl. It was a new drug synthesis, one neither target could have never encountered before, and in a strong enough mixture to put a horny bull moose down for days. "Is this target two?"  
  
The lieutenant raised his night vision goggles and peered over at the target, never moving from his position near the Asian woman. Judging from his scrutiny of her, he really liked the Asian woman. Well, she was kind of pretty, if you were into that sort of thing. "Target two was a carrot top, Jones, and she didn't have no skunk stripe in her hair."  
  
"Yeah, but this could be a wig. Who in the fuck would bring a girl here otherwise?" Well, who would? It was probably a form of child abuse if not plain old sheer stupidity.  
  
Garcia scratched his chin and scowled, like he had a bad taste in his mouth. "Why don't you check then?"  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"If it's a wig, yank it off. C'mon, we're down to time here."  
  
Jones looked down at the girl, and suddenly regretted being the first one out into position. Yes, he was wearing gloves, but ... touch a mutie?  
  
Okay, yes, logically he knew they weren't contagious or anything, but still the very idea gave him the willies. At least these ones looked more or less human. There were some that didn't; there were some that were so grotesque he was surprised Animal Control wasn't called on them.  
  
Because he didn't want to look chickenshit in front of his commander, he reached down and tentatively touched the girl's hair, grabbing a hold of it and giving it a gentle tug. Well, her head moved, but not her hair.  
  
"I don't think-" he began, puzzled.  
  
Then the most extraordinary thing happened.  
  
The Asian woman kicked out, hitting Garcia in the side of the knee and sending him sprawling on his ass, and virtually without pause, she arched her back and jumped to her feet. "That tingled," she said.   
  
Garcia pulled his side arm, but she kicked it away, and then spun into a side kick that nearly took his head clean off at the shoulders; Jones heard something crack as Garcia went limp and sagged to the floor.   
  
What?! How the fuck did that happen?! The voltage was supposed to be great enough to take down any mutie, unless they were an electrical conductor or something.  
  
The two guys at the head of the hall, Marquart and Hanson, converged on her, Hanson emptying his tranq gun in her direction. If any one actually hit her, it didn't even slow her down.  
  
She moved so fast it seemed impossible; like life's editor accidentally cut out a necessary frame. She grabbed Marquart's gun and threw him along with it down the hall - he just barely missed hitting Jones as he flew by, letting out a startled yelp. The crunch of impact with the wall sounded painful. She ripped the gun out of Hanson's hand but he instantly backed up, drawing his knife.  
  
The crazy bitch actually laughed. "Oh goody - my weapon of choice."  
  
She was just as suddenly behind Hanson, holding his own hand - with combat knife - to his throat. "Stop killing yourself," she said, and sliced his hand across his throat. Arterial blood sprayed out in a dark fan, coating the walls and floor in a fine mist before he crumpled to the floor, bleeding out and far beyond hope.  
  
The woman had changed. Her eyes were yellow and seemed to glow in the dark, while her forehead now seemed to protrude over them, like a Neanderthal. Her mouth was crammed full of far too many teeth, the most prominent of which were very large fangs.  
  
Jones realized suddenly that he was very much alone with this quasi-human psycho. It took an effort of will not to piss himself.  
  
"Gonna drag the girl away by the hair, cave man?" She asked, walking towards him slowly. She ran her tongue along her sharp teeth, clearing away blood. Was that ... was that Hanson's blood? He suddenly felt very sick.  
  
He almost raised the gun towards her, but in a moment of epiphany decided to keep it trained on the girl, whom he still had by the hair. "One step closer and I splatter her," he warned. Okay, it was the tranq gun, but it was designed to look like one of their Walthers.   
  
She paused, but the look she gave him was smug, a smirk that showed off her ugly sharp teeth. (It occurred to him that maybe that's what a piranha would like if it could smile.) "Oh really? With a tranquilizer gun? I'd like to see you do that."  
  
"It's real," he lied, panicking in his mind. How did she know it wasn't a real gun? Even he got confused sometimes - they looked the fucking same!  
  
"You wanna live, boy?" She said, and her voice was so cold he could feel his balls shriveling up. There was something in the almost hypnotic glow of her yellow eyes that seemed not only purely evil, but purely inhuman. "Step away, and drop your weapons. You have one chance, and it's as nice as I'm ever gonna be."  
  
He honestly believed that. And yet he knew damn well that Home Front would probably see these tapes, and he couldn't be seen as chickenshit. Of course, he'd have to live to be demoted ...  
  
Staring into her eyes, he had a feeling he knew what a deer felt like when it saw the high beams of a tractor trailer coming straight for it. But he fought the numbing paralysis as best he could. "One step closer, and I kill the bitch."  
  
For some reason, that made her really grin, a leering look that made him want to scream in terror - somehow it was worse than any glower, any cold stare. "Thank you. Now I get to kill you."  
  
"No you don't," another woman said, and Jones looked down, to see the girl was conscious, and for some reason had pulled off one of her gloves, and snaked her hand beneath his pant leg. Before he could kick her off, she touched him, and -  
  
- light exploded in his mind, and he would have screamed, except he had no strength left. He felt like he was bleeding out, but he didn't know where. He heard the tranq gun fall, bounce on the metal floor, but it was so distant it could have happened in another room, and his vision was completely fuzzing out.   
  
The last thing he heard was the girl saying, "I thought Logan told you no killing."  
  
What an ironic thing to hear when someone was killing you.  
  
***  
  
Yasha wondered how much control Rogue had over her powers.  
  
The guard she had grabbed collapsed to the floor, looking like he was dead to the world, and she sat up, grabbing her own head this time.  
  
"Logan told me no such thing," she pointed out, morphing out of "vamp face", which was difficult since the hall now reeked of blood. And from the small taste she got of it, it was good stuff too. "He told you no such thing either. These people are torturers and murderers; all bets are off." And they weren't even her people they were doing this to! Although she wished them luck on torturing vampires; vampires were so adept at that it was unlikely anyone could ever find anything new, nevertheless impressive.  
  
"Oh god, I shouldn't have done that," Rogue groaned, squeezing her own skull like she was trying to pop it. "He hated us - mutants - he thought we were diseased …"  
  
"You got his thoughts too?" That was interesting.  
  
"Yeah, I got nearly everything. Logan and the others must have gotten fried too; these places were booby trapped."  
  
Yasha ran a finger along the wall, pulling away a dollop of fresh blood, which she turned away from Rogue to lick off. Well, it was always a shame to let good blood go to waste. "It will take more than frying to put Logan down. So, have any idea what's in this place? Is there anything worth pursuing?"  
  
"Uh … it's hard to … I don't want to know these things," she said, but Yasha was sure she wasn't talking to her, but to the "voice" of the man in her head.   
  
Yasha turned around, convinced there was no other back up coming (yet), and went to nudge the Russian with her foot. She knew he was still alive, she didn't smell death, but she was willing to bet that metal guy and high voltage were incompatible.  
  
But just then, Rogue sucked in a harsh breath, and looked at her through the veil of her long brown hair. Her eyes were wide and focused inward, and she looked just a little bit insane. "Target one and target two, Logan and Leonie … we were to be left behind …"  
  
"Makes sense."  
  
But she stared up at her, still not bothering to get up off the floor, where she was sitting by the unconscious man whose thoughts she was obviously channeling. "No, no - this place is gonna vaporize."  
  
"I'm sure it is. What evil government conspiracy leaves evidence behind, child?"  
  
"Yeah, but the countdown's on now," she exclaimed, slightly panicky, climbing shakily to her feet. "It's on! We have to get out of here! He doesn't know how to stop it!"  
  
It was always something, wasn't it?  
  
17  
  
Brendan's first thought - after 'Ow' - was the perfectly logical 'What the fuck was that?' It felt like someone shoved him into a microwave and hit "defrost".  
  
Well, at least he wasn't cold anymore.  
  
His head hurt and was really muzzy. But he had an impression of voices before he understood the words, and knew someone was standing near him before any of it made sense.  
  
" - confirm to target," a man said; it sounded like he had a sore throat. "Let's get them out and get moving."  
  
Boots on metal, people shifting around him, and when he thought it was relatively safe, he peeked out of a single eye.  
  
Soldier types, in black gear, were currently grabbing the unconscious (?) Leonie by her limbs, attempting to carry her between then like a medic's litter. There were three others all standing near Logan. One was dicking around with what looked like some heavy duty manacles (the Logan specials?), while the other two had guns aimed down at him like they expected him to pop up like a horror movie slasher and cut them down. (Brendan was rather hoping for that.) "Should we put a couple in 'im, just to be on the safe side?" One asked. They wore black ski masks showing only an oval of eyes, now that their goggles were pushed up on their foreheads, so they all looked rather interchangeable; bad guy lackeys straight from Central Casting.  
  
You know, he knew it was a bad idea coming here. But did Rogue listen to him? No. He wondered if turning all demon as Logan tried to shove them out of the hallway had helped him at all - he seemed to be the only one conscious, save for the bad guys. And was he smelling smoke?  
  
Oh shit oh shit oh shit. He was not a "hero", nor did he want to be one. These guys were ready for them, and they had big fucking guns. But could he stand - well, lay - by while they carried Leonie off (not so bad) and used Logan as target practice (not so good)?  
  
Rogue had talked him into coming by insisting this would be a good opportunity to get Logan's attention, and maybe earn some "brownie points" with him, which he had learned from others was almost impossible; when he was around, he was a cipher. But of course he was - he was the brooding loner, the tortured soul with six pack abs and rock hard pecs you could eat dinner off of.  
  
Oh Jesus Christ, was he going to get himself killed over a stupid crush on a straight guy who barely even knew he existed?  
  
He was a moron; he was the idiot king. He could not take all these guys. He had lucked out the first time simply because it was a distance hit, and save for hurting Scott and Storm, those … stormtroopers, whatever the fuck they were … didn't really want to kill him or Matt, just get them out of the way. He had no idea what these men planned to do to him and Bobby, but just from the amount of firepower they were packing, he assumed it wasn't dress them up pretty and take them out for tea.   
  
One of the guys crouched down before Leonie's head, grabbing her arms, and Brendan could see that the man's broad back not only blocked most of his view of the other soldiers, but their view of him.   
  
He could not take all these guys. But maybe he could buy some time until Logan woke up, or someone from the other group found them. What had Logan said to do if they got into trouble - get their attention? Fine then; he'd get everyone's fucking attention.  
  
Brendan willed himself to "demon up", which not only made him feel a little better, but allowed him to move faster. The soldier in front of him was just starting to stand, holding Leonie by either wrist, when Brendan reached around, grabbing his sidearm with one hand while giving him a full force punch in the side of the head with his other hand.  
  
The guy dropped Leonie and hit the tin wall hard, and Brendan didn't give his partner time to react, just lifted the gun and fired.  
  
Brendan was even more shocked than the soldier - it didn't make the loud bang he had braced for, but a sort of pneumatic hiss, and it didn't fire bullets either. The thing that hit the guy in the face (oh shit, nearly missed him, and from barely six feet away! Fuck, he was a shitty shot) looked like a … like a small dart. But still, it had the desired result: he dropped Leonie, who hit the floor with a thud, and reached for his side arm, only to fumble it half way out of the holster before falling hard to his knees.  
  
Brendan quickly shot another soldier visible behind him, and had just shifted his sight towards another, when the gun finally issued a very loud bang.  
  
Oh, wait a minute, he hadn't pulled the trigger yet.  
  
It felt like something had hit him in the leg. He had vague memories of visiting a distant Aunt out in the Pennsylvania countryside (before the Chambers family disowned his mother; it was before his eidetic memory started in earnest), who owned a couple of horses. He could recall being specifically told not to stand behind one, but he was four and stupid, and he did; he almost couldn't remember waking up to find himself inexplicably twenty feet away, laying on the ground, with an ache in his head and a sprained ankle. He didn't remember pain so much as impact.  
  
The same was true here. It felt like Aunt Laine's horse had kicked him in the thigh.  
  
He sprawled on his ass, unable to help falling as his right leg seemed to give out on him, and as he tried to catch himself, he lost hold of his gun. He instantly tried to grab it again, but another shot rang out, so close to him he could feel the wind of it as it passed him by and hit the gun, making it explode into fragments.  
  
"My god, yer an ugly fucker, aren't you?" The soldier said, aiming the smoking barrel of his gun down in the direction of his face. His friend was sliding up beside him, back to the wall, weapon out. He was effectively surrounded. "Wow, green skin and red … pointy things. You clash with yourself boy, you know that? A Christmas tree mutie. Maybe I'll have you stuffed and hang baubles off yer … protrusions."  
  
Well, maybe he could die with his killer believing his was nothing but a mutant. If he had to die, that wouldn't be so bad. ("Look at me, Ma! I'm dead, but they think I'm Human!")  
  
And then the man's gut seemed to explode.  
  
It was like that scene in Alien, only the guy had about seventy pounds on John Heard, and it wasn't a baby alien that burst through in a decorative spray of blood, but three metal spikes.  
  
Not spikes - claws. Oh thank god, Buddha, Bob, or Elvis, whoever was responsible: Logan was awake.  
  
And these morons were so dead.  
  
Guy number two, sidling against the wall, seemed dumbstruck for a second; maybe he didn't see Logan standing behind his partner. Or just couldn't believe his eyes. Either way, it seemed to take him a couple of seconds to shift his aim.  
  
Logan spun, the first guy still skewered on his claw, and tossed the guy straight into another soldier at the head of the hall, who was just coming to join the party. The second soldier had finally opened fire on Logan by the time he turned around, but if the bullets hit him, it didn't slow Logan down in the least. The first slash turned the gun into trash; the second slash left the guy bleeding on the floor like Brendan. He didn't know if he was alive or dead, but honestly he couldn't give a shit.  
  
It didn't take long for Logan to take care of the other remaining soldiers, but Brendan didn't watch, because he didn't need to. You fucked with Logan, you paid the price, and what a hell of a price it was. You'd think people would have known by now the smartest thing to do was just run away. The sound of his claws ripping through layers of body armor (and by extension, the skin underneath) was eerie as hell.   
  
Almost as eerie as the fact that he had a hole in his leg. It was a pretty big hole too - he was sure he could easily jam a felt tip marker in there - but he couldn't see through the hole to the floor, like he thought he should be able to; it was too bloody. It started hurting too, now that he was looking at it. It was throbbing in time with his heartbeat now, and the pain was hard to describe; kind of like a burning bruise. There must have been a hole (no, an "exit wound") in the bottom of his leg somewhere, because the blood was really growing beneath his thigh. You couldn't die from a leg wound, could you?  
  
"Where're you shot?" Logan barked, but it took a moment for Brendan to realize he was talking to him. "Kid, where're you shot?"  
  
"My leg. I don't think it's that bad," he lied, trying very hard to be macho. Oh Jesus, why start now? And besides, how did Logan know he was shot? He was still coming down the hall towards him, after having finished off the last of the pricks. He retracted his claws, and Brendan was glad, because he could've sworn he'd seen blood on them.   
  
How'd he know he was shot? Well, fuck, he was Logan - he probably smelled it.  
  
Logan crouched down beside him for a better look at the wound, and as he touched his leg, he said, "This might hurt."  
  
"No, it's okay," he told him, and he really wasn't lying this time. "It's mostly kinda numb."  
  
"Golden hour," Logan muttered to himself, peering inside the bullet hole.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Shock, adrenaline. Once that wears off, you'll feel it." Finally Logan stopped his examination, and said, "I don't see the bullet, so it's a good bet it exited. It doesn't look like it hit the artery, but it's damn close."  
  
"Artery?" Oh Christ - he could die from a leg wound?!  
  
Logan pulled up his shirt, and did something Brendan thought was a figment of his imagination: he tore it. Well, he tore a long strip of it off the bottom, and an extra piece that he wadded into a ball. Exposing that skin (he was an innie), Brendan saw for the first time he had smears of blood on his side, and trickles that had soaked into the waistband of his jeans. "You're shot too," he said, a little shocked. So Logan gets a cap busted in his ass (possibly several), but was he sitting on the floor like a useless load? No.   
  
Logan shook his head as wrapped the strip of shirt around his leg. "No, the slugs have already fallen out; I'm healed." He secured the wad of cloth over the bullet hole before tying the longest strip tightly around it. It sent a small shock of pain through his leg that made him gasp. "Sorry," Logan said, grimacing slightly. "That should slow the bleeding, but try and stay off your feet as much as possible. And whatever you do, don't revert to Human form."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"'Cause demons can often shrug off injuries that would kill a Human; it's more a help than you know."  
  
Well, how about that? Being demon worked out for him again. It only occurred to him then that he was still "demoned out", all green with those stupid red spikes, a demonic porcupine, and Logan had never done a double take (which he was used to) or looked at him in that way that said, "You are the most grotesque freak I've ever seen, but I'm going to shove my revulsion aside and treat you in an extra patronizing manner." Wow. He even got that from some of the kids at school, who were often more freakier than he was. "I'm sorry I fucked up," he told him.  
  
Logan raised an eyebrow at him. "You didn't fuck up. Ya did good, kid. You almost got 'em all." he stood up, wiping his bloody hands on the legs of his jeans.  
  
Brendan was now sure he was in love.   
  
He coughed, the air starting to taste sour, and said, "You know, I think something's burning."  
  
Logan nodded his head back towards the entrance. "The charge set some of that fucking paint thinner on fire."  
  
Brendan looked sharply over his shoulder, but could only see what might have been a cozy glow (under any other circumstances) emanating from a hall further down towards the front. The front?! "Shit - are we trapped?"  
  
"No, I'll get us outta here," he said with the utmost confidence, walking down the hall in the other direction. "But I wonder where these fucks came from."  
  
He was talking to him like he was one of the other adults or something. He was going to faint for from joy, or maybe just smoke inhalation or blood loss. Logan not only knew he existed, he was treating him like an equal. Maybe he should get shot more often.  
  
What the hell was he thinking?!  
  
"You're not leaving me here, are you?" He asked, trying to figure out how to stand without bending his leg. It was really starting to ache now, and it felt like he tied the bandage too tight, but it was a tourniquet, right? To keep him from bleeding to death? (Oh, what a lovely thought.)  
  
"What the fuck hit us?" Leonie asked, grabbing her head and slowly sitting up. She healed a lot slower than her "dad", didn't she? Maybe because she was a kid and he so clearly wasn't.  
  
"Electric shock." Logan paused and looked back at her. "Help him," he said, and Brendan was astonished to see Logan was pointing at him.  
  
Leonie was too, and stared at him in disbelief before looking back at Logan. "Why the fuck should I do that?"  
  
"Because he saved your ass."  
  
"I didn't ask him to."  
  
"That's the beauty part - you didn't have to. Now help him, and I'll see if Bobby's still with us."  
  
Leonie got up, moving her head from side to side as if trying to work the kinks out of her neck, and she helped him stand up, nearly yanking his shoulder out of its socket in the process. Strong girl, wasn't she?  
  
She glanced down the hall, and asked, "Does he know the place is on fire?"  
  
"Yeah. Kinda hard not to, huh?"  
  
Although she scowled at him like he smelled bad, she did drape his arm around her shoulders and help him keep standing up. He felt stupid, like a lame horse, but with just the two legs.  
  
Logan patted Bobby on the cheeks with increasing severity. "Hey, kid, come on," he said, and finally Bobby turned his head and tried to wave him off. "Wh-what?" He finally started to look around, and must have remembered where they were, because he seemed less groggy and more alarmed. "Oh, hell." He then stared for a few seconds at the bloody body of a soldier near him. Brendan was willing to bet money that guy was never getting up again. Finally, Bobby said, "I guess I missed a lot."  
  
"Nothin' new," Logan said, grabbing his arm and pulling him up to his feet. He looked shaky but otherwise okay. Brendan wasn't sure if the electric shock had gotten to him more, or the sight of the bodies had.  
  
Logan turned him in the direction they had initially come in, the direction now blocked by fire, and said, "When you're strong enough, put that out, and get everyone outside. I'll meet you there."  
  
"Fuck you!" Leonie snapped. "If you're goin' in, so am I."  
  
"Me too," Brendan said, if only so Leonie didn't drop him. But hell, he was ready to follow Logan to the ends of the earth.  
  
Bobby dry washed his face and looked pale and disheveled, like he'd just woken up in the middle of a nightmare. "I guess that makes it unanimous. I'll need a minute to feel ready to put out that much ice anyways."  
  
Logan glowered at all of them, but then rolled his eyes, a tacit "Damn kids", and went on down the fire free end of the hall. They followed him as best they could, a funereal conga line.  
  
They heard Logan slash open a metal door (?), but because they were around a bend in the corridor, they didn't see it. They just came upon a gaping hole in the metal wall, and then went inside.  
  
It was a cool room, and dark, the air free of smoke. They stepped out onto what seemed to be a metal landing, with a metal staircase leading down into …  
  
Brendan wasn't sure what he was seeing at first. It was too bizarre to even contemplate outside of a sci-fi show or something. But it looked like a whole floor of coffins. Glass coffins. 


	9. Part 9

Logan was already down there, walking among them as if looking for something. Leonie was staring at them with unusual concentration, and took his arm off her shoulders and propped him against the railing so she could leave him behind so she could down the stairs and join him. Bobby must have seen, because he moved up next to him to make sure he could still stand up. "What the hell is this, you think?" Bobby asked him, his voice hushed like it really was a funeral parlor.  
  
"If I say people who really like putting up vegetables for the winter, you won't freeze me, will you?"  
  
"I'll think about it."  
  
"Then I have no idea."  
  
Bobby shook his head, then asked, "What happened to you anyways?"  
  
"I was shot." The wound was really starting to hurt now, and he could feel blood trickling down his leg, a warm crawl along his skin that was almost itchy, and it was starting to pool in his hiking boot. But all he could think was "Logan touched me! He tore his shirt to shreds for me!" He really needed to look into Prozac when they got back to the mansion.  
  
Bobby stared at him, slack jawed and wide eyed. "Shot? What happened? Why?"  
  
"It's a long story."  
  
Their attention was diverted as Logan suddenly shattered one of the coffins with his claws, causing a clear, slightly pinkish fluid to gush all over the cement floor. Were these growing tanks?" He asked Leonie, sounding both angry and horrified. "Is this where you're from? Do you even know?"  
  
Leonie stared at all the tanks, her head moving mechanically and her expression blank, as if she didn't remember, or didn't want to remember. "I-I don't-"  
  
"Damn it, Leonie, don't give me that shit! I can smell you're lying!"  
  
Lying had a smell? Well, why not?   
  
"I don't know!" She screamed, and sounded both angry and scared. "I don't remember this place - I don't remember anything! I just know we shouldn't be here!" her voice broke slightly, and she admitted, in a quieter, harsher voice, "I'm scared, all right? This place makes me want to run away. We should go."  
  
Coincidentally, there was a loud boom, like one of the hallway walls just collapsed, and both he and Bobby felt a cold breeze of outside air on the back of their necks. They turned to look, but currently saw nothing. "Company?" Logan shouted up at them.  
  
"Maybe," Bobby said, holding up his hand, getting ready to use his power defensively if he had to.  
  
But the first thing they saw, thudding down the hall towards them, a silver metal guy in an X-Man jacket. Quickly the metal started melting away from his face, and they could see it was just Piotr, with Rogue and Yasha right behind him. "We have to go," Rogue said, squeezing past Piotr to get ahead of him. "These places are rigged to detonate! It was all a trap!"  
  
"No shit, Sherlock!" Logan shouted back. Leonie quickly started heading back up the stairs, and she ran her forearm across her face. She wasn't crying, was she? Wow - would wonders never cease?  
  
"Logan, come on," Bobby said, as he was still down there, still wandering among the coffins - or growing tanks, whatever he said.  
  
But Logan waved at them dismissively, never looking back. "Go without me. There's gotta be some clue in here somewhere."  
  
"The place is gonna blow up!" Rogue exclaimed, exasperated.  
  
"It won't hurt me - go without me!"  
  
"Like hell," Yasha snapped, and barged past them, not bothering at all with the stairs, just leaping down to the cement floor some seven feet below them. "You are coming with us. There never was anything here. It is a roach motel."  
  
Was Brendan confused by the smell of his own blood, or did he smell more blood on Yasha? Well, she said she was a vampire, so that probably made sense. He shuddered to think how she may have taken out any soldiers. Logan may have killed some, but at least he didn't eat them.  
  
Logan turned sharply to face Yasha, claws still out, and even though it was too dim to read his expression, Brendan knew from his posture that Logan was entering the belligerent angry zone; it was not beyond the realm of possibility that he would lash out at Yasha, or anyone who got too close.   
  
He wondered what a psychiatrist would say about his attraction to a man who sometimes scared the shit out of him. No, he knew what he'd say, and that's where the Prozac came in.  
  
"Do you see this place?" He asked her. "Do you see it?! Do you know what it means?"  
  
"It means nothing now. Don't you get it? The girl was nothing but bait to get you here, and I'm not letting them collect."  
  
"I was not bait," Leonie insisted, but her voice was shaky. She now feared that she was, that she existed only to get Logan here, and Brendan felt kind of bad for her. No wonder she had no memories - she didn't need them, did she? She was just a means to an end.  
  
"Get the fuck out of here," he shouted at Yasha. "I'll be all right!"  
  
"No you won't. Don't make me knock you out, Logan."  
  
"I'll help," Piotr said, going back to steel. Well, steel was nothing against adamantium, but it still might make for an interesting fight, in a Battlebots kind of way.  
  
Logan held his arms open, and Brendan could hear the smirk in his voice. "You're welcome to try."  
  
"Do you want those kids to die?" Yasha snapped at him. "I could give a fuck; I've got lots of deaths on my conscience, what's one fucking more? But what about you, huh? Think you can deal with it, Logan?"  
  
Oh, dirty pool. Emotional manipulation. Who knew vampires could use that too? Logan looked up in their direction, and made a noise that was a half growl/half snort in disgust.  
  
"We have to go now!" Rogue insisted anew. How did she know?  
  
There was a pause, no one moving, no one saying anything, for what seemed like too goddamn long. Was Logan actually going to do this? "Fucking get moving already," Logan snapped, and finally started heading for the stairs. "Move. Move!"  
  
When Logan barked an order, it seemed instinctual to hurry to obey, if only to avoid incurring his wrath. Logan retracted his claws as he bounded up the stairs two at a time, and Bobby now took the role of Human crutch, helping him out into the corridor.  
  
Brendan wondered if, for that moment, Logan thought about testing the theory of them staying here to die with him. And if he actually considered fighting with his girlfriend and Piotr.  
  
The place was creepy, sure, but why was Leonie so freaked, and Logan so upset? What was the subtext they had missed?  
  
He wondered if they'd ever find out, or if it was yet another thing that would get thrown on the "mystery of Logan" pile.  
  
18  
  
The buildings didn't actually explode; they imploded.  
  
A small quibble, but one worth noting. Still, they imploded with enough force that the ground shook, and several of the trees around the immediate area lost branches with loud cracks, some possibly fracturing at the trunk. Certainly if Logan had been in the middle of that, he'd have needed a bloody long time to heal.  
  
Logan remained sulky and sullen, even once they started the flight home, and Leonie followed suit, retreating to the back to avoid everyone. Yasha was forced to try and put together the pieces of information she had, while ignoring the zoo around her.  
  
Brachen boy was laying on one of the benches (the only thing Logan had said so far: "Lay down flat. If you sit up, you'll bleed out faster.") in the center compartment, with Bobby trying to work out the contents of the medical kit, and Rogue sitting by herself, trying to get soldier boy out of her head. The Russian was playing co-pilot to Logan's surly pilot, but every now and then tried to worm useful information out of him. "Was that like the place they kept you?" He asked, quietly so presumably the kids wouldn't hear. "I mean-"  
  
"No," Logan snapped, so brutally it could have been a punch. "It was a trap, that's all. Drop it."  
  
But Yasha knew, even as she told him that, it was only a partial truth. It was meant to be a trap, but didn't start out that way. Surely Logan knew that too, which is why he wished to risk personal harm to stay.  
  
Yasha went over to where Rogue was decompressing, and said, "So what was the master plan?"  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"When they acquired target one and two, what were they going to do to them?"  
  
She thought about it a moment, and shook her head. "He didn't know, he was just on the extraction team."  
  
"Where were they going to extract them to?"  
  
"He didn't know that either. They were just gonna load 'em up in a truck. Everyone only knew a piece of the plan, so in case they were probed by a telepath, they wouldn't get much that was useful."  
  
That was clever. Were the bad guys finally wising up? Maybe they finally got tired of chalking up losses. "Does he even know where the head cheese is?" She knew she should use past tense, but that might get to Rogue, sensitive as she was.  
  
She shook her head. "He only knew him as Home Front. He's not even sure he's in a centralized location."  
  
"He keeps moving around?"  
  
"Or no one really knows where he is."  
  
Siege mentality. Logan and friends really must have hurt them badly, or at least put he fear of muties into them. But that would beg the question they wanted him back so bad. Surely there were other, more powerful mutants out there, ones much easier to manipulate. And while it must have cost a ton to pump someone full of adamantium, eventually they'd pay as much or more in lost personnel, time,   
  
and equipment.   
  
So what was it they were really after?  
  
She stared at the back of Logan's head - all that was visible from this position - and suddenly wondered if they had all been looking at this from the wrong angle. The safe assumption was they wanted him back because he was a major financial investment. But what if it was more than that? What if they were more afraid of what he might eventually remember?  
  
Logan, she thought curiously, who did you used to be?  
  
***  
  
Wonders never ceased.  
  
Xavier actually utilized Bob's name to find a "reputable" (was there such a thing?) demon doctor, who met them shortly after they landed. Well, who knew what kind of special needs a demon hybrid might have? Although Brendan wasn't thrilled with the idea, Bobby had given him a pain killer, and he was so stoned he really didn't care. At least she was one of those Human looking demons.  
  
Leonie tried to avoid them all and disappear, but that didn't work. Logan went after her, for all the good it would do. "What do you remember about that place?" He demanded.   
  
"Nothing," she insisted. He was a couple of feet ahead of him, leading him down an empty hall, and never looked back. But her posture was stiff with tension, and she still smelled scared.   
  
He couldn't blame her for being afraid; he could remember how freaked out he was when he finally saw the Alkali Lake complex. Still, that's why he needed to know what was going on.  
  
She stopped suddenly, and it was easy to see why: Xavier had headed her off at the pass, appearing at the head of the corridor. "I can help you sort your thoughts out," Xavier offered.   
  
"Fine," she spat. "You wanna look into my head so bad? Do it then!" It sounded like a threat. If they were anything like his memories, it was.  
  
Xavier took a deep breath, as if steeling himself, and then closed his eyes. I seemed there was only a few seconds before he opened his eyes again, looking startled, and she said, "Happy now?" She then continued on, storming around the Professor, who made no move to stop her.  
  
"What did you see?" Logan asked, letting her go. There was no point trying to get blood out of a stone; at least Xavier might actually answer his question.  
  
He took another deep breath, then looked up at him, eyes clouded with concern. "Her memory loss seems progressive; I'm not sure she even remembers how she came here."  
  
"Seriously? What the fuck's that about?"   
  
Xavier shook his head. "I don't know. She has some idea about the loss; it troubles her."  
  
He could understand that. "What about the place? Are you telling me she had no memories of it?"  
  
"No, she did." He paused for so long, Logan wondered if he was trying to weasel out of saying it. "She recalls leaving it."  
  
"Escaping the place?"  
  
"No, leaving it. It seems … she was let go."  
  
"Let go?" He almost couldn't believe what Xavier was saying. "So, Yasha was right? She was nothing but bait?"  
  
He shrugged. "She really doesn't know."  
  
"But it doesn't make sense. If she was just bait, why weren't they ready for us? The resistance we met with was pathetic."  
  
"You weren't alone."  
  
"I know, but they should have factored that in. I don't get it," he admitted, feeling like he was missing something obvious. "They had no hope of capturing us. So why bother with all of this? To make me realize they have dozens of new, improved versions of me, and I can do shit about it? To drive me crazy? And what about her? Why release her out into a world she's unprepared for?"  
  
"Trying to understand their reasoning can drive anyone crazy," Xavier commiserated. "Right now, I'm worried about Leonie. She feels used and lost. She doesn't know who or what she is."  
  
"That makes two of us." So, great. Not only were things unresolved, they were possibly worse than before. Shit. He ran a hand through his hair, and grudgingly said, "I'll go talk to her."  
  
"No, not right now," Xavier advised. "Give her a little time to calm down. She's shaken, and I think she'd like to be alone for now."  
  
He nodded in agreement; it was yet another thing he and Leonie had in common.   
  
"Speaking of being alone," Yasha said behind him. He thought he scented her creeping up the hall, but didn't think much of it; she wasn't going to attack him now. "Can I steal the hairy guy for a moment?"  
  
Xavier smiled tightly at that, clearly still uncomfortable with her. "Of course. I'll go see how Brendan is doing."  
  
She waited until Xavier was out of hearing distance before she said, "Boy, he hates me, doesn't he?"  
  
"It's not you. I don't think he likes vampires in general." When he turned to face her, he was surprised when she leaned in and gave him a kiss on the nose. "Was that an apology?"  
  
"For what, saving your iron ass? Hardly. I just wanted to let you know I'm hitching a ride outta here with the good doc - I still have some things I have to take care of. But I'll be back soon."  
  
"Things? Like kicking some cult ass for Cujo?"  
  
"Oh, no, I forgot about him. Some other things … but in a similar vein, excuse the pun."  
  
He wanted to ask, but knew she wouldn't tell him. But he also understood that she needed her secrets, like he needed his, just like he understood she had wasted most if not all the soldiers unfortunate enough to run into her; he could smell the blood on her. That was why he wanted her to go with the other, though; she wouldn't try to save any lives but those of Piotr's and Rogue's. Brutal, yes, but sometimes you couldn't afford to be gentle, and it insured they would come through it alive (and they did, didn't they). "Need some help?"  
  
She raised an eyebrow at that. "No. Do I ever? But if I think I could use a little extra muscle, I'll give you a call, yojimbo."  
  
"Were you really gonna fight with me?"  
  
"Of course I was. I don't bluff."  
  
There was something else they had in common. "You know they call me the Decapitator in Los Angeles; you couldn't win."  
  
"Yes I could - I know to avoid your claws."  
  
They stared at each other a moment, each giving the other sly "Admit I'd kick your ass" looks, neither admitting it. Finally, Logan said, "There is no way to have a relationship if we keep threatening to fight each other."  
  
"True. So don't make me threaten you again."  
  
He laughed and shook his head. "Yer a piece of work, you know that? I mean that in the best possible way."  
  
She grabbed him by the front of his torn shirt, pulling him closer. "You'd better." She gave him a more meaningful kiss, then pushed him away. "Take care, tiger. Don't get yourself blown up."  
  
"No promises," he replied glibly. "Stay outta the sun."  
  
She gave him a beauty queen wave before disappearing down the hall, and Logan was left wondering how things could get so fucked up in so many areas at once. Well, why the fuck not? If things didn't get massively fucked up, he'd know he was living someone else's life.  
  
Which really wasn't a bad idea at all.  
  
19  
  
"Ymmy, we're two grown energy beings - let's discuss this," Bob suggested, slowly backing up across the frigid wasteland. He still refused to look past his alabaster legs, giving him time to decide that Ymir had kneecaps the size of Volkswagons. How unattractive was that? How had he ever decided "as big as Godzilla" was a good look for him?  
  
"There's nothing to discuss," he roared, every single one of his massive footsteps making his entire realm quake. "I'm gonna squash you like the stinkbug you are!"  
  
"Now wait just a minute-I don't stink!" Bug he could live with, but at least he could name the correct insect! He felt he was more of a dragonfly, or perhaps a ladybug. Spiders could be okay, depending on the type …  
  
It was then that he felt the air tremble, and behind him an energy portal opened and closed. He turned to see … well, he'd be damned. Again.  
  
Ammit was standing there, looking around at the frozen tundra, and possibly cold, seeing as she was barely wearing a pretty but barely there opalescent sari. She was still in her red panther body, though, so maybe the fur was warm; he wasn't sure the crocodile tail dragging over the snow noticed. "Is this where you ended up," she asked, a little surprised. "I supposed I should have guessed …"  
  
"Who dares to defile my lands?!" Ymir roared, obviously not recognizing her.  
  
She stared up at him, and her drugged look disappeared into a truly horrifying scowl. "Defile? That's a good one coming from you, Ymir."  
  
He froze (ha!), massive foot raised slightly, and in a strangely small, pathetic voice, asked fearfully, "Ammit?"  
  
"No, Horus," she snapped sarcastically. "Who do you think? Now put your foot down this minute!"  
  
Ymir slammed it down so fast Bob was rather surprised he didn't break his own continent. Ammit may have given into indulgence and decadence like the rest of the gods, but she still had an almost obscene amount of power, and her fearful avenger reputation.   
  
"What brings you here, Ama?" He wondered. "Not that I'm not grateful."  
  
She shrugged. "I was bored," she admitted. "I figured I'd tag after you, see if you needed a hand. I guess you did."  
  
"Indeed. Gracias."  
  
"Cammy gone?"  
  
"Yeah, he went poof already. But his big ol' master plan was to leave me in the loving, frozen arms of Ymmy the jolly white giant here."  
  
"He killed another god," Ymir proclaimed. "He should suffer-"  
  
"I've killed gods too," Ama interrupted savagely, the anger making her dark eyes glow. "Do you have a problem with that?"  
  
Once again, Ymir was reduced to a little boy. "No, none at all, ma'am," he replied meekly, scuffing his foot on the permafrost and leaving a divot the size of a Buick. Bob was finding it very hard not to laugh. Several bad puns about him being "pussy whipped" also came to mind, making it that much harder not to burst out snickering.  
  
Well, at least he could console himself with the knowledge that Ama wasn't all feline; she was also part reptile, at least this time out.  
  
"So you're done here?" Ama asked him. "Ready to go home?"  
  
"Like you wouldn't believe, darlin'."  
  
She cast a savage glance up in Ymir's direction. "Would you like me to teach him a lesson about being a rude host?"  
  
Bob wondered if that noise he heard was a glacier starting to shift, or Ymir whimpering. "Nah, let's just duck out -what d'ya say?"  
  
Ama continued to give Ymmy the stink eye for a good long minute, then gestured behind her, opening a portal that shimmered like desert heat. "Sure, why not? Ever going to invite me to your place, Bob?"  
  
"Absolutely, love. Next time I have a barbecue, you're on the guest list."  
  
Although he was very much looking forward to returning to the Earth realm, in another sense he wasn't. Because that bastard Cammy had been right about one thing: god powers in a Human's hands was indescribably dangerous, to the Human and to the reality it chose as its home. No good had ever come of such a thing, and no good ever would.  
  
They were corrupt; as entities they were hopelessly tainted by their powers. Most Humans could not handle that level of madness without going mad themselves.  
  
Maybe he would have to put home on hold. Maybe he would have to search for Jean instead, before she could return to Earth.  
  
Before she could inadvertently destroy it all.  
  
***  
  
Even though she double checked the address, she still wondered who would open the door when she knocked.  
  
After about thirty seconds, the doorknob turned, and the door was flung open with a caustic, "I told you, I'm not interested in a copy of "The Watch-" Angel began, and the stopped his rant as he saw it was her. "-Tower," he finished, puzzled.  
  
"I don't like Jehova's Witnesses myself," Yasha agreed. "Their blood is always so bland. It's like diet blood. Same with Mormons."  
  
Angel looked past her, down both ends of the posh condo's blue velvet carpeted hallway, as if looking for Logan. "Uh, what-"  
  
She pushed open his door all the way and stepped inside, shoving him back with a single finger to the chest. "I'm flying solo, Batman. I had a favor to ask you."  
  
As she shut the door behind her, he laughed darkly, taking up an unconscious defensive posture even as he crossed his arms over his chest. He was ready to fight her if he had to, and obviously thought he had a shot. Men. "A favor? Uh huh. How did you get this address?"  
  
"I told Spike I wanted to bug the shit out of you. He not only told me where you lived, but he got a secretary to download a map from Mapquest." She pulled it out of her coat pocket to show him. After a wary second, he ripped the piece of paper out of her hand and studied it. He crumpled it into a ball, and muttered, "Goddamn Spike."  
  
Yasha glanced around at Angel's well furnished, tasteful suite, and knew he'd moved into it as is - there was no personal touch here, nothing that indicated he had actually accepted the place as his own. Perhaps that was a point in his favor. "What the hell is it you want, Blood?" he asked, tossing the ball of paper aside. He still wasn't ready to turn his back on her yet.  
  
A plasma screen t.v. was flashing its images quietly in the background, and she peered past him to see what he was watching. She guessed that his using the latter half of her nickname was some kind of insult, so she ignored it. "The Maltese Falcon?" She asked, surprised. Somehow she suspected porn.  
  
"You have thirty seconds before I throw you out the door," he replied sourly.   
  
"Mister grumpy. Aren't you even going to offer me a cup of blood?"  
  
"Twenty five seconds."  
  
"Would it make you feel more charitable if I told you this is about Logan?"  
  
He cocked his head to the side, his dark eyes full of suspicion. "What do you want from him?"  
  
"What most sane women want from him - a really good fuck."  
  
He narrowed his eyes in distaste. "Twenty seconds."  
  
"Why is Wesley the only one trying to help him?"  
  
That made him nearly flinch, a guilty look briefly flashing over his face. "What? That's not true-"  
  
"You have the resources of an evil empire at your fingertips, and all you've coughed up are files so obscurely coded they're indecipherable."  
  
He tightened his arms across his chest, and shifted into an even more defensive posture. "Do you know how large their achieves are? They have records going back to the Inquisition."  
  
"And you have an abundance of lackeys. I'm not going to buy it."  
  
He threw out his hands in frustration. "You try riding herd on an evil empire then."  
  
"I'd love to, but somehow I think you'd reject my resume."  
  
"Are you done? Have you made your point?"  
  
"No. Haven't you ever wondered why the Organization would waste so much time, energy, and resources trying to catch just one man?"  
  
He shrugged uncomfortably, clearly not wanting to discuss this. "He was important to them, and they're evil."  
  
"Not enough."  
  
"He was, as far as we can tell, their top assassin. Is that what you wanted to hear?"  
  
"I know that, but you know as well as I do, Angelus, that finding a killer isn't that difficult; killing is easy." He scowled at the use of his "real" name, but she ignored that. She wasn't about to let him pretend that he was somehow better than her because he had a soul - they were far more alike than he would ever acknowledge. "Why they really want Logan is hidden in those memories they tried to erase. The key to his future is in his past."  
  
He kept giving her a stony look. "You really were cursed by Buddhists, weren't you?"  
  
"I know everything there is to destroying groups - remember the Templars? And I'm telling you, if we want to save him, this is the way to go."  
  
He held open his hands in a universal "What the fuck?" gesture. "What is the way to go?"  
  
"Look into his past, but not with the Organization. We have to go beyond that; we have to delve as deeply as we can. Do you want to save Logan from them? Do you want to crush the Organization once and for all? Then we need to find out who he was, who he used to be. We need to find out what they keep trying to bury." She paused, if only for effect. She could see the wheels turning behind Angel's eyes. He didn't necessarily trust her, but perhaps he was finally seeing the wisdom in what she was saying. "We need to find out who Logan really is."  
  
He continued to eye her with great suspicion, but she ignored it, and waited patiently for his answer. 


	10. Part 10

20  
  
Logan wasn't surprised to wake up back in Jean's garden, but he was surprised to see what had changed.  
  
He sat up, only to find the grass he was laying on drastically overgrown; it was as shaggy as a bad haircut. Around the garden the restraining wall of trees had also grown, but this time in ways bizarre and unnatural. Branches as thick as human torsos intertwined with one another, reaching up like static green and black torches, ringing the perimeter and nearly touching the flaming red sky.  
  
And Alkali Lake was back. The frozen water that had drowned the base was exactly where a sprawling mess of shrubs had been before, and the water was a perfect mirror for the crimson sky. "Jeannie?" He asked, wondering if she had gone back to being the flaming thing in the water again. He really didn't feel like going for a swim.  
  
"Everything's going wrong," she said, behind him. He pivoted sharply on his heels to find her coming out of the gothically overgrown forest, and he realized he felt just a bit like Alice In Wonderland. Did that make Jean the White Rabbit or the Mad Hatter?   
  
"Still?"  
  
She glanced at him with an apologetic grimace. "A different kind of wrong."  
  
As soon as she was within reach, he grabbed her and pulled her into a kiss. Maybe he did feel like he was cheating on Yasha a bit, but also not really; after all, how long had he had a "thing" for Jean? It was like she had seniority.  
  
She responded in kind, pressing against him so tightly there wasn't a single bit of space between them. She was still emitting warmth like a radiator, but he didn't care. It was almost kind of erotic. Her hand caressed the back of his neck, and he slipped his hands beneath her shirt, smoothing his hands down her back.   
  
Quite suddenly she shoved him back, and shook her head vehemently. "I'm sorry, Logan, but … yesterday was a mistake. I shouldn't have -"  
  
"It didn't feel like a mistake." He had locked his arms around her waist, and she had her hands on his shoulders, as if prepared to shove him away, but she hadn't yet. Although apart, there was no denying the intimacy of this.   
  
She glanced down, never quite meeting his eyes. "I know. I'm just … you're my only connection to my old life. I think perhaps I used you, and I'm sorry."  
  
"Use away."  
  
Finally she did meet his eyes, if only to frown at him. "Logan-"  
  
"What exactly is wrong?" He interrupted, not ready for a mindscape rejection too.  
  
After a moment, she said, "I'm not really sure. It felt like a part of me just … died, but by the same token, I felt more … energized."  
  
"Aren't those feelings kinda mutually exclusive?" He wondered, although at the same time, he realized Bob must have killed Camaxtli. At least it hadn't killed Jean too.  
  
"I know. I can't really explain it."  
  
"But you're okay now?"  
  
She shrugged helplessly. "I think so. I just feel a little … lost."  
  
He couldn't help but scoff. "There's a lot of that goin' around lately."  
  
She gazed at him curiously, her fiery eyes almost painful to look at. "What do you mean?"  
  
It was his turn to shake his head and draw her into an embrace, so mainly he didn't have to look at her face. He really didn't want to face her now brutal brand of telepathy again. "Nothing really. It's just been weird without you."  
  
She hugged him tightly, resting her chin on his shoulder. "It's been weird without all of you too. I miss you."  
  
"You're comin' back soon?"  
  
"I think so. But … I'm a little worried."  
  
"About what?"  
  
She paused for a moment, happy to hold him tight and never look him in the eye. "My own strength. I'm not sure I have a handle on it yet."  
  
"It takes some getting used to," he admitted, remembering how initially startled he was by his own strength, in the beginning - but that was before he realized he had about a hundred pounds of metal in his body. As soon as he understood what felt like a nudge to him was in actuality a violent shove, it got progressively easier to manage. "But I know you'll find a way to deal with it. You're a pretty strong babe, when you wanna be."  
  
"Babe?" She repeated, but he could hear the smile in her voice. "You're playing with fire there, you know."  
  
"It's a hobby of mine."  
  
She pulled back, only far enough so she could look him in the face. Her eyes seemed a little less painfully bright this time, and she moved her hand up his spine, to the base of his neck. "You're not afraid of getting burned?"   
  
Was that a double entendre? If it was, it was one of the odder ones he'd ever heard, and that included ones he'd tried to use. "I'll heal," he offered, wondering if that was a potential double entendre too. Well, under the right circumstances …  
  
She kissed him this time, passionately and powerfully - he got a sense of that power she was talking about; it was like she was a barely insulated high voltage wire. He wondered if he should mention that to Bob next time he saw him. He also wondered if Jean had suddenly gotten over her earlier reservations.  
  
Well, like he always believed, a good mistake was best done twice.  
  
21  
  
Logan made sure his mind was perfectly clear as he opened the door to Xavier's office and looked in. "Storm said you wanted to see me?" He'd encountered her in the hall, even though he had no idea she was back. He forgot to ask if she found the Dutch mutant, but on the other hand, he didn't care all that much.  
  
"Yes, please, come in," Xavier said, straightening some books on the corner of his desk. The sunlight spilled over the room from the window behind him, and seemed to wash out the entire room into shades of sky blue and pale yellow.   
  
"How's Brendan doing?" He asked, as he shut the heavy wooden door behind him. He was curious, especially since the last time he saw him, he was pretty heavily doped up.  
  
"Oh, fine. His recovery has been remarkable, considering. And Doctor Halbidi asked me to compliment you on your tourniquet - she thought it looked remarkably professional, even with such crude tools."  
  
That must have been the name of the demon doc. All he could do was shrug. "The bullet might have nicked his artery. I didn't want him bleedin' out on me."  
  
"Actually, it did nick his femoral artery," Xavier told him. Kindly, he waited until he had taken a seat before saying that.. "Your tourniquet and his mostly Brachen physiology kept him alive. It made me curious where you got your medical knowledge from."  
  
Logan stared at Xavier, trying to figure out what he meant by that. His voice and expression were so perfectly neutral it was difficult to say. "I don't have any medical knowledge. I can just battlefield triage, that's it." As soon as it was out of his mouth, he realized that probably wasn't the best thing to say.  
  
"Battlefield triage?" He repeated curiously, confirming Logan's worst fears. "That's very interesting."  
  
He was inexplicably angry, and he knew he was about to say something uncalled for, but he couldn't stop himself. "Well, whatta ya expect? I'm a killer; I know anatomy pretty well." Logan instantly covered his face with his hands, and tried to tamp down his impatience. What the fuck set him off there? Maybe he was just in a stroppy mood this morning.  
  
He heard Xavier shift in his chair, and launch into his most paternal tone of voice. "Logan, what you did -"  
  
He let his hands fall to his lap, and interjected, "Is that why you wanted to see me? To compliment me on my ability to make a tourniquet?"  
  
Xavier sighed, as if he knew he wasn't going to let him finish that sentence. "No. I was curious what happened there yesterday."  
  
He shrugged. "You got everyone else's reports, right? I got nothing to add. Except … and ya know, it pains me to side with 'Clops on anything, but … Brendan's got the stuff, you know. He can improv if he has to, and he takes the big risk for the team; he won't go quietly, no matter how bad the odds. He's got real survivor skills, but not so much that he just runs away. You should fast track him."  
  
The Professor nodded, not at all surprised. "His mutant ability seems to make him excel at everything he learns academically, but he does seem to utilize skills far beyond what he's learned in class. Still, he has no goals or aims whatsoever. He's so accustomed to circumstances ripping the rug out from beneath him that he makes no plans beyond simply getting through the day."  
  
"Yeah, well, I don't blame him." Logan decided not to say "That's my philosophy too," because he felt that wouldn't by a mark in Brendan's favor. "Maybe once he gets used to things around here, he'll adjust."  
  
"Perhaps." Xavier seemed a little disappointed, as if he'd hoped he'd elaborate more on what happened between him and Leonie, and what exactly they found there. "Also, a friend of yours called from Los Angeles this morning - Wesley?"  
  
"Oh yeah?" He wondered if he had more files for him.  
  
"You were sleeping, and I thought it best to leave you undisturbed. He didn't leave a message, save to ask that you call him back as soon as possible."  
  
He nodded. "Gotcha."  
  
"Oh, and maybe, when you're done with that, you could go have a talk with Leonie. She snuck out this morning."  
  
"And you didn't stop her?"  
  
"There was no reason to. She really has no idea what she's doing. She wished to be alone, and she simply went down to Abbot's Park. She's still there."  
  
Which meant Xavier must have been using Cerebro to check up on her. No wonder she wanted to be alone. Well, not that he could blame Xavier for wanting to keep an eye on her; she could be very dangerous.   
  
"You're really the only one here she's had major interaction with," Xavier continued, as if he needed to explain why he wished to send him after her.  
  
Logan shook his head, not needing to hear this. "She's my daughter. It doesn't matter that she was brewed up in a test tube and a vat somewhere - she's still mine, right? I'll go talk to her." He sighed as he stood, still not ready to face fatherhood of any kind, and certainly not the involuntary kind. But it was hardly her fault, was it? They used her and fucked her over too, just like they had done to him. It was one of the many sad things they had in common. "She remember anything else?"  
  
Xavier shook his head. "Not that I can tell. It's a sad state of affairs."  
  
"Life is, more often than not." He considered his options, and headed for the door. "Wesley can wait, I'll bring her back, then I'll call."  
  
"Logan, be careful with her. This is her waking up in the snow moment," Xavier said, making him pause. How'd he know about that? Well, he had asked him to read his mind, hadn't he? "You remember how you were then. She's not as … scattered -"  
  
"Insane," he corrected him. Well, there was no point in sugar coating it.   
  
Xavier's lips thinned, as if he found the very concept of the word distasteful." - but she is feeling as displaced and lost in the world. You may be the only person who can possibly understand what's she's going through."  
  
Logan paused with his hand on the doorknob, and looked back at Xavier, feeling an inexplicable wave of pity for that sullen, terrible tyrant of a girl. "It's not her fault, you know. She didn't deserve that."  
  
"You didn't deserve what was done to you either."  
  
Logan turned away, swallowing a scoff. "I'm not so sure about that," he replied, but was out the door before Xavier could ask him what he meant. He didn't really want to talk about it anyways.  
  
Some things were just best left alone.  
  
****  
  
She wasn't hard to find at all, in spite of the early lunch crowd starting to fill the park.  
  
She did her best to find an out of the way corner, a slightly graffiti marked bench under the shade of a spreading elm, and just off the entrance to an arboreal jogging path. There was no avoiding the people, though. Businessmen in dress shirts and ties, jackets off and sleeves rolled up, sat on the benches near the reflecting pool, chugging espressos and loudly discussing things such as "Ronald, that dick in accounting". College ages kids played hacky sack on the grass, while younger kids obviously skipping school attempted to skateboard on the bike path without getting hit by cyclers or rollerbladers. There were many epithets thrown around, mostly in Spanish and English. It smelled like sunlight, exhaust, coffee, and too many people.  
  
She sat in the dappled shade, looking much the same as she had when he first saw her in Times Square, only she had swapped her old Moosehead t-shirt for a newer t-shirt that had written on it, in white letters 'When I Snap, You'll Be The First To Go'. He wondered if she took that from one of the other kids, or it was given to her (anonymously, of course) by someone who thought he was being funny. But her ubiquitous old backpack was sitting beside her on the bench, as if she wasn't concerned about someone grabbing it and running, and he knew now she wasn't. She figured she could take anyone. Well, almost anyone.  
  
He didn't look up as he approached, just kept staring down at the toes of her sneakers, and didn't seem to notice him, even as he sat down on the bench beside her. Then she said, somewhat listlessly, "Here to drag me back?"  
  
"No. I'm here to see if you're all right."  
  
She snorted, and looked up, a weary sadness in her eyes. "All right? What do you think? I'm a spy clone who only exists 'cause I was supposed to lead you into a trap. How all right am I supposed to be?"  
  
"That's not true. You're neither a spy or a clone, and that wasn't a trap."  
  
She stared at him in open disbelief. At least she was acknowledging his presence. "You got amnesia that fast?"  
  
He smirked. Oh, he wished. "No. That was too easy, and I think you know that. How long could they have held any of us?"  
  
He watched that idea sink in, watched a troubled look pass over her face like a cloud, then she looked away again, out at the path. People were gawking at them - Logan could feel their eyes on him, punching through his back like bullets, but often when he looked at them he only caught the eye of one out of two of them. But when he glared back, they quickly looked away and pretended to be doing other things. He was just going to have to get used to the creepy feeling of other people's eyes on him - there were too many people in the park. "If it wasn't a trap, what was the fucking point?"  
  
"I don't really know. I was hoping we could figure that out together."  
  
She scoffed and shook her head. "I can't remember jack shit. You think I'll be any good figuring out what those fucks are up to? Please."  
  
"Darlin', I've forgotten several lifetimes worth of stuff. That doesn't stop me. It can't."  
  
She stared staring down at her sneakers again, and he figured that was a bad sign, but after a long minute, where he got to enjoy the singing birds interspersed with multi-lingual cursing and cubicle farmers blaming their failures on someone else. Finally, she said, "How do you do it? How do you live like this? You know people are after you, but you don't know who or why, and you don't know who you are or what you're supposed to be. It's all so fucked up."  
  
"I know. But I have to keep going because I don't know what else to do. What's the other option? Give up? Does that sound like a good option to you?"  
  
"No," she sighed, twisting her hands nervously in her lap. "But I don't know who I am or why I should bother to do anything."  
  
"Live for yourself - it's all you can do." He was aware he could be talking to himself, and in a weird way, he was.   
  
After a moment, she grabbed her backpack, and dragged it onto her lap. "D'ya know what I got in here?" He realized it was rhetorical, so he waited for her to continue. "Money. I rip off some white trash wannabe drug dealers who were trying to dope up girls in this club so they could fuck 'em. It's two hundred bucks, more or less."  
  
He supposed he should be glad she just ripped them off of money, but maybe not - they sounded like real scumbags. "What of the drugs?"  
  
"Seems it all fell out of their pockets and backpacks when they got torn. Quite a coincidence, huh?"  
  
That was his girl all right. "They make stuff so cheap nowadays."  
  
"Amen."  
  
They sat in silence for a moment, while Logan did his best to ignore the itch of eyes on them, and she set her backpack aside once more. The lack of speech wasn't as uncomfortable as it was before. "So, what now?" He finally asked her. "Two hundred won't get you that far, but it's a start."  
  
"I was thinkin' of going to California - but why? I have nowhere to go; I shouldn't even exist, should I?"  
  
He shrugged. "Neither should I, but here I am. Why don't you come back to the school with me?"  
  
"Why? They hate me there, and I hardly fit in."  
  
"No one fits in - well, not since Scott left. And as far as hating you goes … have you ever given them a reason not to? You come off as pretty cocky."  
  
She let out a sharp laugh. "This from "I'll be fine!" guy."  
  
"Runs in the family, I guess."  
  
"There's a frightening thought." She paused, and held her hand up, trying to catch a small spot of sunlight in her palm. She then turned her hand over and seemed to stare at the back of it, as if trying to see the tips of the bone claws hiding beneath her skin. They were easier to see if coated with metal. "Can you help me at all?"  
  
He knew what she meant, and wasn't about to point out he knew very little about his own past. Truth be told, he wasn't sure he wanted to know anything more about his past; what he had learned was bad enough. "Hello, my name is Logan - I'm a mass murderer who's had at least two total mental breakdowns. Coffee anyone?" "I ain't gonna promise you I'll find much, or that you'll like what I find, but I promise I'll do my damnedest to find out everything I possibly can." He stood up, and held out his hand to her, partially a gesture of truce, and partially a gesture of help. "Deal?"  
  
She gazed up at him skeptically, and for a moment he could see why Yasha had said she had his eyes. It really showed when she was suspicious. "Why? 'Cause I'm your daughter?"  
  
"Because they've hurt enough people. No more. It stops now."  
  
With a very reluctant smile, she took his hand, and allowed him to help her to her feet. "We'll kick their asses."  
  
"Absolutely. They don't know the can of whoop ass were gonna open up on 'em."  
  
She smirked, and shoved the backpack into his chest, so he had to snag it with his free hand before it hit the ground. "Yeah. They're gonna be sorry they ever let me go, huh?"  
  
It seemed that everyone claimed time slowed at moments like these, but that wasn't true. Three things happened in rapid succession, so fast that Logan only realized the order in retrospect: a muffled "whoomp", like someone slapping a down pillow against a microphone; red filling his vision, like an explosion of neon; and a feeling of impact, like he'd just been hit in the head by a falling Skylab.  
  
He lost consciousness, but didn't realize it until he started to regain it, swimming back up to awareness smelling blood, his head throbbing like an open, infected wound. He heard murmurs of people around him, including one man shouting at someone that they needed an ambulance here now. He opened his eyes to feel the burn of healing still happening upon his forehead. He felt a liquid, warm heaviness on his body, and looked down, expecting to see that his chest had been ripped open, because he could feel the warm blood gushing down his side, and the stench of it was almost overwhelming. But that wasn't what he saw.  
  
What he saw was the top of Leonie's shattered skull, her blood spilling out of the top where she used to have a scalp, chunks of her brain matter splattered across his chest like discarded chunks of hamburger. She reeked of death; she could never heal from an exploded cranium.  
  
Something fell off his face and fell to his chest, then rolled to the ground. A small flattened disc of silver; an impacted bullet, that smelled adamantium - no wonder it packed such a kick.  
  
"Stay down," an Indian man said, off to his left. He was the man on his cell phone to 911, and he looked stricken, like he had never seen something so horrible in his life. "Don't move. Help is on its way."  
  
But there was no help needed - not for him, and not for Leonie. Oh god, those bastards, those motherfucking bastards, they -   
  
He noticed, out of the corner of his eye, something laying in the grass beside him on the right. A rock with a note tied to it.   
  
With a hand covered in Leonie's blood, he grabbed it and held it up to his face so his still focusing eyes could read it. In neat, bland computer print, the note read simply: "We can take everything from you whenever we wish, Wolverine. You live this life at our discretion. Enjoy it while you can."  
  
He stared at the black text until it seemed to be burned into his retinas, and then held it away, the rock dropping from his hand as if he'd been shot again. But no gunshot could ever be as bad as that.  
  
Logan just laid there, holding his dead daughter's body to him as tightly as he could, listening to the distant sirens get closer, and fighting back tears.  
  
They had never let him go. They would never let him go.  
  
***  
  
The End  
  
(There will be a short intermission…) 


End file.
